AUSTERE FRENCH PROTESTANTS assemble for services in a converted house bought by the Lyons congregation in 1564. Though few in number. Calvinists in France were usually wealthy and well organized, and thus won limited toleration until 1572. Then thousands were massacred in widespread riots.
Revolutions seldom bring about the visionary's dream; they are metamorphosed by other men with other dreams. So it was with the Reformation. The movement that Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Knox launched in the desire to lead men to personal salvation became in the end a political phenomenon.
From the beginning the impulse to reform the Church had mingled with political currents. But the spiritual impulse was dominated by dynastic intrigue, greed and war, and in the end national politics determined the fate of the Reformation all over Europe. What began in a mood of spiritual piety had its triumph in a rearrangement of secular power. In this respect the Reformation marks the beginning of modern times—of the ascendancy of the state over religion.
When the Edict of Worms was issued in 1521 Catholicism seemed invincible. The Emperor Charles was sworn to stamp out heresy. The obstinate Luther was outlawed, and the preaching of his ideas was made an offense against the Empire.
Then the support that Luther had once had appeared to wane. Before the year was out, the urbane and erudite Erasmus broke with him, and other scholars followed suit. Their wish from the beginning had been to reform the Church, not destroy it, and to raise the intellectual standards of the Christian world. Not only was Luther rupturing the institution; in the eyes of some he was erecting the foundations for another tyranny in its place. The loss of the intellectuals meant the addition of a strong force against him, for the men of that class who deserted Luther returned to the support of the Church.
Greater even than this loss, in terms of numbers, at least, was the disenchantment of the lower classes. The peasants, excited by Luther's denunciation of authority, had taken him at his word and rebelled against the lords. When he wrote a stinging tract reprimanding the peasants and urging the authorities to take action against them, he alienated the lower classes.
Nevertheless, the Lutheran cause retained great strength. Its main appeal was to the princes, the nobility and the burghers—people who were sufficiently powerful to thwart political interference from Rome; sufficiently prosperous to resent the econom-
Ic drain of taxation by the papacy; sufficiently educated to discard medieval superstitions; sufficiently self-confident to balk at having their consciences dictated to.
The Emperor's oath to defend the faith did nothing to dissuade these groups from their Lutheran inclinations. The princes were historically opposed to imperial authority. The burghers, like burghers in every country of Europe, were developing a national consciousness; and Charles, who had been reared in the Netherlands and never learned to speak proper German, was regarded as a foreigner. Luther's call to established authority endeared him to the princes, and his attack on the drain of money to Italy struck a vital chord among the moneymaking townsmen. One by one princes were won over to Luther's religion, and one by one cities followed. A few remained loyal to the Catholic faith and to the Emperor; the result was the growth of two political factions: one Catholic and the other Lutheran.
But the real advantage to the Lutheran cause lay in the Emperor's preoccupation with international politics. Charles's far-flung domains made him look formidable in the 16th Century, but the very extent of these territories was a drawback. In allowing his eye to be diverted abroad, Charles neglected what was happening in Germany. He warred with France, which for years had been antipathetic to the Habsburgs; with the Turks, who were encroaching on Hungary; and even with his sometime ally, the pope. Not until 1529, eight years after the Edict of Worms, did he turn his attention to Germany. When he did, it was only to send word to a Diet that was meeting at Speyer, an imperial city in Bavaria, that the Edict of Worms was to be enforced and Catholic worship restored.
He was too late. By that time many of the princes and cities had already taken over local regulation of the Church and instituted Lutheran practices. Several princes and 14 cities drew up a solemn protest against Charles's order. They came to be known as the "Protesting Estates," and subsequently the name "Protestants" was given to all who left the Roman Church.
This protest at last aroused Charles to address himself in earnest to the religious question. He came to Germany in 1530 and called a Diet at Augsburg to which he summoned leading theologians of both persuasions—but not Luther, who was still outlawed.
Both sides met in a spirit of conciliation. The Protestants, making what was to be their last effort to have their ideas accepted by the Church, endeavored to prove that there was in Lutheran thought "nothing repugnant to Scripture or to the Roman Church." They presented a general statement of their beliefs, the cardinal point of which was that justification of the soul should be by faith alone. (This statement, which is known as the Confession of Augsburg, remains to this day as the creed of the Lutheran Church, and it has influenced the drawing up of subsequent creeds.)
The theologians tried to debate, but they could not come to agreement. The Emperor dismissed the Diet, promising to urge the pope to call an ecumenical council to decide on the points in dispute. The Lutherans were ordered in the meantime to return to Catholic practices by April 15, 1531.
Charles succeeded only in intensifying the antagonism of the Protestants. Faced with the threat of coercion, six princes and representatives of 10 cities convened in February at Schmalkalden, a little town in central Germany, and formed a military alliance known as the Schmalkaldic League. Other princes and towns sought admission to the league, and within 15 years it had grown to include most of the Protestant Estates of the Empire. It fortified the position of Protestantism and established the Protestant party as a strong political force in Germany.
A VICTORIOUS EMPEROR, C/i«r/es V Stands over Francis I of France on an elaborately carved "handstone." Towns offered such objects to visiting monarchs as flattering bribes to protect their property—and women—from the royal guard.
Over a period of more than 20 years Charles made sporadic attempts at negotiation with the Protestants, but he was still distracted by events outside Germany—further war with France, incursions by the Turks into Austria and Hungary, and efforts to secure the Crown of the Empire for his brother Ferdinand. When Charles finally called his last Diet, in 1555, the Lutherans had grown to such numbers that they demanded and received recognition. The result was the Peace of Augsburg, a treaty providing that every prince and every free city should have the right to decide whether the people under his or its jurisdiction should be Catholic or Lutheran.
This was not a treaty signaling toleration in the modern sense. It provided only for Lutherans and Catholics, and not at all for Anabaptists and Calvinists, who now had some adherents in the Empire. Anyone disagreeing with the faith of the prince or the city administration had the option of moving elsewhere, but he did not have the freedom to remain and worship as he chose. The historical importance of the treaty lay in the fact that it conceded the existence of two religious points of view, and in this it was even more remarkable than the historic Diet of Worms. Worms had foreshadowed the end of medieval unity; Augsburg made this a fact. At Worms a single man had spoken his mind in defiance of the established order, but he had been outlawed; at Augsburg the principles he voiced gained legal sanction.
From a religious point of view, Augsburg was a victory; from a national point of view, it was a defeat, for in strengthening the rights of the princes it frustrated political unity. While other nations solidified as mighty powers, the German people were to remain divided and weak for another 300 years.
Though it went counter to the trend toward national unity that was prevailing elsewhere in Europe,
The Peace of Augsburg was nevertheless consistent with another trend that was equally prevalent: the move toward secular determination of religious affairs. By 1555, when the Peace of Augsburg gave the territorial states in Germany the right to opt for either of two religions, England had already forged a state religion of its own.
Luther's theses had been sent by Erasmus to a colleague in London shortly after their publication in 1517. After this, Lutheran ideas slipped in gradually—largely through England's trade with the Netherlands, Germany's neighbor and cultural cousin. If the result was doctrinal variation from Catholicism, however, little attention was paid it by the people at large, for the English were less inflammable over matters of dogma than the Germans.
But there were other movements afoot, and a process was set in motion that was the reverse of Germany's. Whereas in Germany the princes and burghers adopted the new faith first and the Emperor was obliged to give it recognition, in England the monarchs saw state advantages to Church reform and the people followed them. The process began in the 1520s, the same decade in which Luther was outlawed in Germany. It began with King Henry VIII.
Henry was a singularly popular and effective King: he was handsome, athletic, learned and generous to his favorites. He was also egotistical, despotic and perfidious. By his actions in domestic and foreign affairs he wrought the most sweeping social changes of the loth Century—but they were changes that came so gradually and so legally that their full effect would not be realized until the reign of his daughter Elizabeth.
When he came to the throne in 1509, Henry married Catherine of Aragon, who was the widow of his brother Arthur. She was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain (and hence she was also the aunt of the Emperor Charles V). The marriage was made for purely political motives—to reinforce an alliance with Spain against France. Spain soon formed another alliance with France, thus making itself less attractive to Henry than formerly. Butmore important, Catherine failed in the most important duty incumbent on a queen: she gave Henry no son to inherit the throne. Only one of her children survived, and that was Mary, a pale, thin and introspective girl. It was not at all certain at the time that a woman could legally inherit the throne of England.
Henry's marriage to Catherine had been questioned at the beginning; he had needed a papal dispensation to marry his sister-in-law—a dispensation that the pope granted as a favor to Ferdinand and Isabella. When there was no male heir after more than a decade, people recalled the words of the Book of Leviticus, that "if a man shall take his brother's wife. . . they shall be childless." This was a religious and a superstitious age, and the heirless Henry, no less than his simplest subject, wondered if he were being punished by God.
Meanwhile, he had become infatuated with Anne Boleyn, a dark-haired lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine. Anne was no beauty, but she possessed enough power in her slender person to demand a price for her favors to Henry—and she wanted to be Queen.
Probably in hopes of begetting a male heir (for Anne was now pregnant), perhaps only because he was tired of Catherine (who had grown withered and unattractive), Henry decided to marry Anne Boleyn. He ordered Thomas Cardinal Wolsey—who held both civil and religious offices as Archbishop of York, Chancellor of the Realm, and Papal Legate to England—to secure a papal annulment of his marriage to Catherine.
Wolsey was a gifted statesman, but most Englishmen despised him. He was the new-rich son of a butcher, and had risen to eminence by currying
Royal favor. He was vain, self-seeking, and given to extravagant displays of his wealth and power. He taxed the people heavily. He had an ambitious foreign policy that threatened war with the Emperor Charles V, whose Netherlands were the best customers of the English merchants. He boasted of his link with Rome and explained many of his unpopular acts by claiming to speak in the name of the Pope, thus intensifying in clergy and laymen alike an already existing aversion to the Holy See. This was the man Henry dispatched to secure an annulment of his marriage.
Annulments were not uncommon in this era; monarchs might receive them as political favors from popes. But in this instance Pope Clement VII had other political considerations besides Henry. Charles V was loath to sever the tenuous link he had with England through his aunt. His armies stood in Italy, threatening violence if the Pope consented to the divorce of Charles's aunt. Clement, a weak and ineffectual man, was unnerved by the dilemma he faced. Wishing not to alienate either ruler, he wrung his hands and procrastinated. Wol-sey's usual diplomatic finesse failed him; he delivered no annulment. Henry therefore dismissed the Cardinal from office in 1529 and took up the matter himself.
Henry now proceeded, by a series of cautious, legal steps, to sever his nation from Rome. First he married Anne Boleyn in secret. Next he appointed a new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cran-mer, whom he instructed to declare his marriage to Catherine void on the grounds that it had been illegal to begin with. Cranmer obliged and Anne was crowned Queen of England. Then, to rationalize his actions, Henry persuaded Parliament to pass the Act in Restraint of Appeals, denying all jurisdiction of foreign powers in English affairs—implicitly meaning the jurisdiction of Rome in royal marriage.
Pope Clement VII, finally aroused, struck back by excommunicating Henry and declaring his marriage to Anne invalid. National feeling was strong, however, and the people supported the King.
And Henry had only begun. By the Act of Supremacy he had Parliament name him supreme head of the Church in England—a title Parliament readily gave, for Wolsey had crystallized English resentment against the Church of Rome. By other parliamentary acts Henry assumed the right to make all ecclesiastical appointments, and he required all clergymen to swear allegiance to himself instead of the Pope.
Finally, by the Act of Dissolution, he dissolved most of the monasteries. He confiscated their land and their wealth, which he lavishly tossed to the eager gentry. The monks were given the option of joining the few monasteries that were allowed to remain, or of entering the secular clergy.
Henry had no Lutherlike quarrel with dogma; he wanted power, and he got it by presenting his case to a willing people like an affronted monarch resisting a foreign tyrant in the person of the Pope. Only two men of note refused to comply with Henry's demand for allegiance. One was Archbishop Fisher of Rochester, a kindly and elderly humanist who was Catherine's confessor and her chief defender. The other was Sir Thomas More, the first nonecclesiastic to hold the post of Chancellor in England, and a brilliant author. With his book Utopia (a coinage from the Greek meaning "no place") he gave a word to the English language and a concept to Western literature. Utopia was a tale told by a traveler returned from a strange new world where men were uncorrupted bv vice, where reason and beauty and law worked in harmony to make the perfect societv.
Both More and Fisher saw tragedy in the sundering of Christendom, and they perceived tyranny in Henry's acts at a time when others were too inflated by national self-consciousness to controvert
The royal rationalizations. Because they refused to obey the King, More and Fisher were beheaded for treason. But these were atypical acts of bloodshed in an otherwise orderly revolution.
Only three years after his marriage, Henry tired of Anne. Her offense was probably the same as Catherine's, that she produced no male heir (she had only a daughter, Elizabeth), but Henry accused her of adultery and incest, and sent her to the Tower of London and then to the execution block. He took another wife, Jane Seymour, who had the good fortune to produce a son—Edward, a frail and sickly child but a bright one, and a male heir.
Henry's culminating move came in 1536, when he directed the drawing up of a definition of faith and the Book of Common Prayer. This was no move prompted by religious piety; it was done in the interest of precluding schism in the King's domain. The definition was drawn up at Henry's behest by clergymen who conferred at first with theologians at Wittenberg. Henry, however, had considerable knowledge of theology himself, and he rejected the Wittenberg-inspired definition as too unorthodox. Several other definitions followed, until finally, with the publication of the "King's Book" in 1543, Henry arrived at a creed that was thoroughly Catholic except for its emphasis on the authority of the Bible and on justification by faith. Its significance, however, was in its issuance by the government. Hearing of it in Germany, Luther said; "This King wants to be God. He founds articles of faith, which even the Pope never did." Later, when Henry declared Romanists traitors and Lutherans heretics, Luther thanked God that he and his followers were rid of the blasphemer who had tried to enter their fold.
When Henry died in 1547 (having married three more childless wives), Edward was a boy of nine, and two regents governed in turn, Edward died at 15, and the incumbent regent, the Earl of Northumberland, endeavored to seat his own family on the throne. But the English people had learned to love the monarchy, and they wanted a royal heir. Pushing aside their prejudice against women, they turned enthusiastically to Henry's elder daughter, Mary. She was dour and ailing, but she had suffered outrages and neglect, and this gave her a certain appeal.
Mary's appeal did not last long. Her sufferings had embittered her without teaching her understanding. Disregarding national sentiment against Spain, she married her cousin. King Philip 11. Failing to perceive how little the people cared for dogma, or how strong was their aversion to Rome as a foreign power, she supposed that her own sudden popularity represented enthusiasm for the faith of her disgraced mother. Clinging steadfastly to that faith, she tried to restore its practices in England.
REFORMATION DYNASTIES reflected the religious disputes of the times. England's Henry Vlll (far left) broke with Rome to gain a male heir: ironically, the death of his son Edward VI brought a Catholic to the throne —Henry's daughter Mary. In Holland, William of Orange, once a page to the Habsburg Emperor Charles V, led Protestant rebels to victory against Charles's pious Catholic son.
WILLIAM OF ORANGE
She began moderately, but her attitude grew more intolerant and her methods harsher. She annulled the acts passed in Henry's and Edward's reigns and replaced them with others persecuting heresy.
Mary's persecution served only to make the people want Protestantism the more—not for its dogma, but because it seemed to represent freedom from tyranny. Like her celebrated cousin and father-in-law, Emperor Charles V, Mary died a failure. Both suffered the same tragic flaw. They had strong convictions of faith, but they could not grasp the significance of their subjects' sentiments.
When Mary died in 1558, Englishmen joyfully acclaimed Elizabeth, because she seemed to promise peace. Elizabeth proved to be a masterly ruler, in character and in politics the very opposite of her half-sister. Having no strong faith herself, she took care to offend none of her subjects; and knowing the value of mental privacy she said she would make "no windows into men's souls."
Unlike Mary, Elizabeth had from childhood been wooed to her father's ideas. She was 17 years Mary's junior—too young to suffer vicariously her mother's disgrace, young enough to be inculcated with the same ideas that made her father popular. Also, she was by nature pragmatic, which Mary was not. She was swayed by the knowledge that, although a great many people in England remained Catholic, the influential classes were Protestant. In England, as in Germany, Protestantism appealed to the landed gentry and the aggressive burghers, and Elizabeth needed the support of these to rule. She reigned for 45 years, and in that time she brought her island country from provincial insularity to international importance.
Under her reign Parliament repealed the legislation of Mary's reign, seized the little land that remained to the Church of Rome, drew up another definition of faith and revised the Book of Common Prayer. The articles of faith determined in her reign are still fundamental to the Anglican creed.
The Church that evolved under Elizabeth was a compromise. It took matters of dogma, such as justification by faith and the nature of the sacraments, primarily from Luther (though enough ambiguity remained to satisfy widely different beliefs and to allow for privacy of conscience). It retained the ritual and erected a hierarchy modeled on the Church of Rome—the difference being that the monarch, instead of the pope, was the head.
The course that England took represents the triumph of the monarchy over the Church; that of the Netherlands represents the beginnings of modern republicanism. In the Netherlands perhaps more than in any other country religion took effect on burgher mentality and intertwined with political circumstances to alter both church and state.
The Netherlands in the 16th Century included approximately the same territory that today constitutes Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, plus a strip of northern France. The territory was a crossroads of Germanic and Latin culture and language. Germanic influences predominated in the north and Latin in the south. As Habsburg property it was under the suzerainty of the Emperor Charles V, who was himself a Netherlander. It came under the political domination of Spain in 1555, when Charles bequeathed it to his son Philip along with the Crown of Spain.
By a privilege dating back a century, when the territory was ruled by the Duke of Burgundy (Charles V's great-grandfather), the people were partly selfgoverning, having an Estates-General, or assembly of nobles and bourgeoisie, modeled on that of France. They had been virtually autonomous since 1530 because Charles, as King of Spain and Emperor, left them much to themselves.
The people of this area were sturdy and selfreliant, hardened by centuries of stemming the sea and reclaiming the land. Geographic and natural elements also made the country rich and an entrepot of ideas. The Rhine, the Scheldt, the Meuse and dozens of other waterways crisscrossed the country, carrying the commerce of interior Europe inland from the coast, where great natural ports harbored the fleets of Spain and Portugal, England and Italy. Antwerp alone in the 16th Century had 2,500 ships anchored at a time, and of these as many as 500 sailed in a day. (This is approximately the same number of planes that flew out of New York International Airport on an average day in 1965.) Not only in Antwerp, but in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Leyden, merchants congregated with cargoes of wool, gold and spices, and exchanged ideas with zeal and curiosity.
As a clearinghouse of ideas, the Netherlands bred intellectuals. Their lower schools were unsurpassed and their illustrious scholars (of whom the cosmopolitan Erasmus was only one) were renowned all over Europe. They had scores of printing presses (50 new publishers sprang up in the years between 1525 and 1555) and there was a high rate of literacy among nobles and bourgeoisie alike.
Inevitably, the scholars and merchants brought in the new religious ideas—Lutheranism, Anabaptism and Calvinism. Of all these, the one that was to implant itself most indelibly on the national character was Calvinism. Its strongest appeal was to those who had grown rich by self-assertion and were therefore ready to quarrel with the established power, but in time it won much of the aristocracy, too. Its emphasis on frugality, hard work and selfreliance won ready acceptance among a people who had cultivated these very qualities in fighting the sea and reclaiming the land. Its doctrine of the elect gave them moral support under persecution. Its disciplined organization provided a framework that was politically useful in a land where the monarch was absent.
The Netherlanders had had a profound affection for the Emperor Charles V; even his edicts against heresy—which he promulgated here as in Germany —failed to alienate them, for they regarded Charles as one of themselves and, as far as they were able, they simply neglected to enforce the edicts. They accepted his son, Philip II, cheerfully enough on his accession, but they soon learned to despise him. Philip, a melancholy man who sincerely believed himself chosen by God to play a historic role, was a conscientious ruler who spent long hours reading dispatches and planning public works. He believed that the monarchy was absolute and that the Church, its ally, was essential to social order. Though he had the blond complexion of his northern forebears, he was thoroughly Spanish in upbringing and temperament, and he never learned to understand the Netherlanders' character.
Spanish and Netherlandish ideals were poles apart. The Spaniard prized wealth, but wealth to him meant land. He was unaccustomed to banking and trade, and he looked with disdain on the newfangled preoccupation with commerce. So Philip arrived at a policy in keeping with both Spanish sentiment and Dutch resources; he taxed the commerce that he held in contempt. In addition, he appointed his own officials to both secular and ecclesiastical posts, depriving the Netherlanders of administrative and judicial rights they had been developing for more than 100 years. Finally, he installed an army of Spanish troops.
If the Netherlanders' commercial enterprise was distasteful to the Spanish, their unorthodoxy was abhorrent. Philip said he would die 100 deaths rather than be king of heretics. It seemed Spain's historic destiny to fight the heathen. For hundreds of years Catholic Spain had waged ferocious war against the Moslem infidel, and the effect of the prolonged conflict had been to impregnate the Spanish soul with mixed strains of brooding mysticism, rigid orthodoxy and angry intolerance. In the 16th Century the Netherlands beckoned Spain to a new crusade on which Philip embarked with terrible zeal. To eradicate their heresies he imposed the Inquisition, an institution that had been inaugurated in Spain nearly 100 years before by his great-grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella, for use against the Jews and Moslems.
Ill feeling over all these grievances simmered for a decade. Finally it found expression among a group of powerful nobles who in 1566 presented to Philip's regent a petition calling for abolition of the Inquisition and for the summoning of an Estates-General to deal with the religious question. One of the regent's coterie said contemptuously, "Ce n'est qii'uti tas de gwewx"—"They're nothing but a mass of beggars." The nobles and their followers adopted the title for themselves. Henceforth they were the
Gueux, the Beggars, and the beggar's money belt and food bowl became the symbol of their revolt.
Behind these noble Beggars stood several powerful figures, among them Lamoral, Count of Egmont, and William, Prince of Orange. Egmont, who was brilliant and valorous in war, radiated a charm that captivated his contemporaries and future generations alike; two centuries after his time the legends that survived about him were to inspire Goethe to drama and Beethoven to music. Orange, an educated man who spoke seven languages, was called William the Silent for his penchant for keeping his own counsel. He was born the richest man in the Netherlands; he left his children almost penniless, having sold most of his possessions to raise money for the cause of his countrymen.
Neither Egmont nor Orange was ardently religious; both were prompted by the desire to end Spanish oppression, and in this they represented popular sentiment. They were members of the regent's council, and despite Philip's reign of terror they were loyal to the principle of monarchy, for they wanted independence without rebellion.
But the same popular sentiment that these nobles represented was being fanned by other men less conservative than they. Calvinist missionaries had by this time dispersed from Switzerland and France, and were heatedly preaching against the evils of tyranny. In August 1566, not long after the nobles had presented their petition to the regent, riots broke out in Armentieres, then spread to Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, and north to the provinces of Holland and Zeeland. Like the uprising of the American Colonies in 1775, this rebellion had at its roots the rising resentment of an adolescent nation against absentee rule and extortionate taxation. In the case of the Netherlands the resentment was compounded by religious persecution, and it was therefore in religion that it made itself manifest. Mobs broke into churches, hammered the statuary
To shards, shattered stained-glass windows and burned Catholic books. Egmont and Orange at first tried to quell the disturbances, but riot erupted into war.
To crush the rebels Philip dispatched Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, a terrible figure of merciless discipline and sanctimonious piety. Alva had inherited a vast estate at the age of 20; now, at 59, he had for several years been serving Philip on the battlefield and in the council of state, exhibiting valor and severity in both. He looked the very model of an El Greco painting: tall and thin, with dark, somber eyes and a beard the color of Toledo steel.
In 1567 Alva marched 10,000 soldiers into the Netherlands, where he inaugurated a ruthless dictatorship and a long and savage war that was to decimate the population, despoil the land and cripple the prosperity that had flourished for hundreds of years. He established a Council of Troubles, a tribunal designed to deal with rebellion as the Inquisition dealt with heresy, and it soon became popularly known as the Council of Blood. Thousands of people implicated in treason were done to death, among them Egmont, who was publicly beheaded. Orange, escaping Alva's apprehension, fled to Germany, where he raised an army of 25,000 men. He returned to organize all the provinces of the Netherlands in opposition to Philip. Many of the people were still Catholic in faith, but the issue now was foreign tyranny, not religion.
The south, which was under more Latin influence and weaker economically, was conquered by Spain and remained with the Church. As a political territory it was tossed hither and yon for another three centuries, passing subsequently under the domination of Austria, France and the Netherlands, until finally it emerged in the 19th Century as the nations of Belgium and Luxembourg.
But the north controlled the sea and was better able to withstand the war. In 1581 seven northern provinces declared their independence from Spain and established a new government—a government that was now predominantly Calvinist in religion, but that allowed for varying worship. Orange served as its chief for the next three years, until he was shot in his own house by a Catholic fanatic after Philip had offered a reward for his head. Bloodshed continued for years, hut the people for whom William of Orange had given his wealth and his life held out. Eventually they formed the Dutch Republic, which in the 17th Century was to recover the wealth lost during 50 years of extortion and war and to become the leader of all Europe in finance, art and colonization of foreign lands. This tiny nation, no bigger than the state of Maryland, was to spread to the rest of the Western world a spirit of temperance and industry—and, eventually, tolerance.
By the time that the Dutch rebellion began, half a century had passed since the publication of Luther's Theses, and Protestantism in one form or another had penetrated all over Europe. The ideas generated by the Reformation were to remain fundamental to Western thought, but as a movement the Reformation now began to run down. It met its first significant defeat in France.
In France, as elsewhere, there had been early preaching for reform, but in France the reforming spirit was primarily Christian humanism—an attempt among intellectual Catholics to cross the strains of classical ethics with the piety of the people. And humanism never did take root among the people at large; it was too intellectual, too abstract.
All over Europe the interplay between people and rulers had determined the fate of the Reformation, and France was no exception. In that century, no significant numbers of people wanted the Reformation, and the state did not need it. In 1516, by the Concordat of Bologna, a treaty made by King Francis I with the papacy, the French King was
Granted the right to make ecclesiastical nominations—the same right that Henry VIII secured from Parliament without consulting the pope. Because he used ecclesiastical appointments as patronage to reward officials and courtiers for their services, and because he took substantial revenue in Church taxes, the French King would have gained no advantage by upsetting the status quo.
Francis 1 was an extravagant man and an opportunist. He was not a militant Catholic by any means, nor were the members of his family. His sister, Margaret of Angouleme, was attracted to the new doctrines; she gave haven to the persecuted and was herself the author of The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, a pious tract of questionable orthodoxy. King Francis shifted his political alliances among the pope, the German princes, and even the Turks, as it suited his purposes. When he wanted to court the favor of the pope or the French clergy, he engaged in intermittent persecution; when he sought the support of the German princes in opposition to Charles V, he let the Protestants alone. His son, Henry II, engaged in somewhat harsher persecution in an otherwise uneventful reign.
When Henry II died in 1559, he left his wife, Catherine de' Medici (daughter of the famous Italian banking family and a niece of Pope Clement VII) and a frail brood of heirs, the eldest of whom was 15. One after another three kings came to the throne, and one after another they died. Catherine ruled all of them. She was a shrewd woman who had no scruples about playing on the vanities of her subjects for political ends. Her aim was national peace, but her hand was unsteady and the monarchy therefore weakened.
Its weakness allowed the rise of several dissident political factions; and in France, as elsewhere, political antagonism was asserted in religious terms. In the first of these factions were the ardent Catholics, who stood for orthodoxy, for the extirpation of heresy, and, generally but not always, for support of the Crown. Their champion was the Duke of Guise, leader of the French military forces and head of a family whom the favors of Henry II had raised to national prominence.
The other group comprised the Protestants, called Huguenots for reasons that are now unclear. They were disciples of Calvin, and the more visionary among them wanted to make the French nation over in the austere pattern of Calvin's theocracy in Geneva. They were few in numbers but strong in organization. Most of their members, like the members of Protestant groups everywhere, came from the commercial class, but they had a few important adherents among the nobility.
The Catholic and Huguenot factions struggled intermittently against each other, and for and against the Crown. Catherine, who had no particular religious convictions of her own, knew that the overwhelming majority of her people were Catholic. But she also knew that the Huguenots could keep the state in constant turmoil if they were not given consideration. To keep the peace she passed a series of edicts, the last of which granted the Huguenots limited freedom of worship. Nobles were allowed to hold services in their own domains, and certain towns were allowed Protestant chapels. The people chafed under the restrictions, but they had in fact considerable freedom for a minority group in the early 1560s.
In a further move to win the good will of the Huguenots, Catherine arranged the marriage of her daughter Margaret to Henry of Navarre, who was the titular leader of the Huguenot party. He was also, as the grandson of Margaret of Angouleme, Francis I's sister, next in line to the throne after Catherine's children.
But the marriage that was to have brought peace brought instead one of the bloodiest disasters of a bloody age: the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in
Which uncounted thousands of Protestants died. The origins of this terrible event are uncertain, but they appear to rest in Catherine's resentment of a powerful Protestant noble, Gaspard de Coligny, who had a strong influence on her second son, Charles IX.
The Protestant nobility were gathered in Paris for the wedding of Margaret to Henry of Navarre, and here was a perfect opportunity to wipe out the Protestant leaders. Catherine seems to have induced her son to appoint a group of assassins to slay the Huguenot notables assembled for the wedding, sparing only Henry of Navarre and the Prince of Conde, another heir to the throne. Word of the plot spread among the populace, which was predominantly anti-Protestant. On the morning of August 24, St. Bartholomew's Day, when the bells in the church of St. Germain I'Auxerrois sounded, the Parisians rose in a fury and massacred Huguenots all over the city; before the day was over the Seine was running with the blood of thousands of dead. The slaughter of Paris set off a chain of other massacres all over France that went on until October. The Protestant party in France was not defeated; it was only roused to war.
A war of religion was in full sway in 1589, when the last of Catherine's sons died after an ineffectual reign. The Protestant Henry of Navarre was heir to the throne, but the French were not ready to accept him. They recognized the legitimacy of his claim, but they did not want a Huguenot. The Guise family, who headed the Catholic party, coveted the throne for themselves, and Henry of Navarre had to fight to secure it. He won it by valiant fighting and by renouncing his Protestantism. "Paris is worth a Mass," he is supposed to have said—a statement not so cynical as it has sometimes been portrayed, for Henry was mindful of his subjects' wishes and determined to give them national peace.
Having renounced Protestantism for himself.
Henry brought the bloodshed over religion to an end in 1598 by the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, which gave the Protestants legal recognition. It allowed them to hold secular offices, and it instituted special courts to see that they received justice. This was an edict promulgated not out of a conviction that men had the right to freedom of conscience, but because Henry had the vision to see that recognition was the only way to keep the peace. It arose out of the same principle that gave birth to the Peace of Augsburg in Germany: that the Church of Rome was no longer sovereign over all of Christendom. From now on secular statesmen rather than popes and prelates would define the values and order the direction of European society.
Everywhere in Europe the same movement was in process: in the Scandinavian countries, where the kings, like the German princes, used Lutheranism to consolidate their power; in Poland, where the Catholic faith became a nationalist bulwark against awakening Russia; in Hungary, where Calvinism and Catholicism joined to oppose Habsburg encroachment.
For the men who began the 16th Century in spiritual groping, the political result of the Reformation would probably have been appalling. The zeal of their cause had been put to a use they had not envisioned, and in the process had helped create hatreds and ambitions that were a far remove from the Christian virtues they had hoped to instill. In seeking to make men spiritual, Protestantism had succeeded in making them secular.
World History
