Part 347

Charles was still too much involved in foreign wars to venture upon a struggle with the Lutherans; but a few years more sufficed to free his hands. The Treaty of Crespy, in 1544, ended his last conflict with Francis I. In the same year, Pope Paul III. summoned the long promised General Council of the Church to meet at Trent the following spring—by which appointment a term was put to the toleration conceded in the Peace of Nuremberg. The Protestants, though greatly increased in numbers, were now less united than at the time of the formation of the Schmalkaldic League. There was much division among the leading princes. They yielded no longer to the influence of their wisest and ablest chief, Philip of Hesse. Luther, whose counsels had always been for peace, approached his end, and died in 1546. The circumstances were favorable to the Emperor, when he determined to put a stop to the Reformation by force. He secured an important ally in the very heart of Protestant Germany, winning over to his side the selfish schemer, Duke Maurice of Saxony—now the head of the Albertine branch of the Saxon house. In 1546 he felt prepared and war began. The successes were all on the imperial side. There was no energy, no unity, no forethoughtfulness of plan, among the Lutherans. The Elector, John Frederick, of Saxony, and Philip of Hesse, both fell into the Emperor's hands and were barbarously imprisoned. The former was compelled to resign his Electorate, and it was conferred upon the renegade Duke Maurice. Philip was kept in vile places of confinement and inhumanly treated for years. The Protestants of Germany were entirely beaten down, for the time being, and the Emperor imposed upon them in 1548 a confession of faith called "the Interim," the chief missionaries of which were the Spanish soldiers whom he had brought into the country. But if the Lutherans had suffered themselves to be overcome, they were not ready to be trodden upon in so despotic a manner. Even Maurice, now Elector of Saxony, recoiled from the tyranny which Charles sought to establish, while he resented the inhuman treatment of Philip of Hesse, who was his father-in-law. He headed a new league, therefore, which was formed against the Emperor, and which entered into a secret alliance with Henry II. of France (Francis I. having died in 1547). Charles was taken by surprise when the revolt broke out, in 1552, and barely escaped capture. The operations of Maurice were vigorous and ably conducted, and in a few weeks the Protestants had recovered all the ground lost in 1546-7; while the French had improved the opportunity to seize the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul and Verdun. The ultimate result was the so-called "Religious Peace of Augsburg," concluded in 1555, which gave religious freedom to the ruling princes of Germany, but none whatever to the people. It put the two religions on the same footing, but it was simply a footing of equal intolerance. Each ruler had the right to choose his own creed, and to impose it arbitrarily upon his subjects if he saw fit to do so. As a practical consequence, the final division of Germany between Protestantism and Catholicism was substantially determined by the princes and not by the people.

The humiliating failure of Charles V. to crush the Reformation in Germany was no doubt prominent among the experiences which sickened him of the imperial office and determined him to abdicate the throne, which he did in the autumn of 1556.

Reformation in Switzerland.

A generation had now passed since the Lutheran movement of Reformation was begun in Germany, and, within that time, not only had the wave of influence from Wittenberg swept over all western Europe, but other reformers had risen independently and contemporaneously, or nearly so, in other countries, and had co-operated powerfully in making the movement general. The earliest of these was the Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, who began preaching against indulgences and other flagrant abuses in the Church, at Zurich, in 1519, the same year in which Luther opened his attack. The effect of his preaching was so great that Zurich, four years later, had practically separated itself from the Roman Church. {1060} From that beginning the Reformation spread so rapidly that in half-a-dozen years it had mastered most of the Cantons of Switzerland outside of the five Forest Cantons, where Catholicism held its ground with stubbornness. The two religions were then represented by two parties, which absorbed in themselves all the political as well as the religious questions of the day, and which speedily came to blows. The Catholics allied themselves with Ferdinand of Austria, and the Protestants with several of the imperial cities of Germany. But such an union between the Swiss and the German Protestants as seemed plainly desirable was prevented; mainly, by the dictatorial obstinacy of Luther. Zwingli's reforming ideas were broader, and at the same time more radical, than Luther's, and the latter opposed them with irreconcilable hostility. He still held with the Catholics to the doctrine of transubstantiation, which the Swiss reformer rejected. Hence Zwingli was no less a heretic in Luther's eyes than in the eyes of the pope, and the anathemas launched against him from Wittenberg were hardly less thunderous than those from Rome. So the two contemporaneous reformation movements, German and Swiss, were held apart from one another, and went on side by side, with little help or sympathy from one another. In 1531 the Forest Cantons attacked and defeated the men of Zurich, and Zwingli was slain in the battle. Peace was then concluded on terms which left each canton free to establish its own creed, and each congregation free to do the same in the common territories of the confederation.

Reformation in France.

In France, the freer ideas of Christianity—the ideas less servile to tradition and to Rome—that were in the upper air of European culture when the sixteenth century began, had found some expression even before Luther spoke. The influence of the new classical learning, and of the "humanists" who imbibed its spirit, tended to that liberation of the mind, and was felt in the greatest center of the learning of the time, the University of Paris. But not sufficiently to overcome the conservatism of the Sorbonne—the theological faculty of the University; for Luther's writings were solemnly condemned and burned by it in 1521, and a persecution of those inclined toward the new doctrines was early begun. Francis I., in whose careless and coarse nature there was some taste for letters and learning, as well as for art, and who patronized in an idle way the Renaissance movements of his reign, seemed disposed at the beginning to be friendly to the religious Reformers. But he was too shallow a creature, and too profoundly unprincipled and false, to stand firmly in any cause of righteousness, and face such a power as that of Rome. His nobler sister, Margaret of Angoulême, who embraced the reformed doctrines with conviction, exerted a strong influence upon the king in their favor while she was by his side; but after her marriage to Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, and after Francis had suffered defeat and shame in his war with Charles V., he was ready to make himself the servant of the Papacy for whatever it willed against his Protestant subjects, in order to have its alliance and support. So the persecution grew steadily more fierce, more systematic, and more determined, as the spirit of the Reformation spread more widely through the kingdom.

Calvin at Geneva.

One of the consequences of the persecution was the flight from France, in 1534, of John Calvin, who subsequently became the founder and the exponent of a system of Protestant theology which obtained wider acceptance in Europe than that of Luther. All minor differences were practically merged in the great division between these two theologies—the Lutheran and the Calvinistic—which split the Reformation in twain. After two years of wandering, Calvin settled in the free city of Geneva, where his influence very soon rose to so extraordinary a height that he transformed the commonwealth and ruled it, unselfishly, and in perfect piety, but with iron-handed despotism, for a quarter of a century.

The French Court.

The reign of Francis I. has one other mark in history, besides that of his persecution of the Reformers, his careless patronage of arts and letters, and his unsuccessful wars with the Emperor. He gave to the French Court—at least more than his predecessors had done—the character which made it in later French history so evil and mischievous a center of dissoluteness, of base intrigue, of national demoralization. It was invested in his time with the fascinations which drew into it the nobles of France and its men of genius, to corrupt them and to destroy their independence. It was in his time that the Court began to seem to be, in its own eyes, a kind of self-centered society, containing all of the French nation which needed or deserved consideration, and holding its place in the order of things quite apart from the kingdom which it helped its royal master to rule. Not to be of the Court was to be non-existent in its view; and thus every ambition in France was invited to push at its fatal doors.

Catherine de' Medici and the Guises.

Francis I. died in 1547, and was followed on the throne by his son Henry II., whose marriage to Catherine de' Medici, of the renowned Florentine family, was the most important personal act of his life. It was important in the malign fruits which it bore; since Catherine, after his death, gave an evil Italian bend-sinister to French politics, which had no lack of crookedness before. Henry continued the war with Charles V., and was afterwards at war with Philip II., Charles' son, and with England, the latter country losing Calais in the contest,—its last French possession. Peace was made in 1559, and celebrated with splendid tournaments, at one of which the French king received a wound that caused his death.

He left three sons, all weaklings in body and character, who reigned successively. The elder, Francis II., died the year following his accession. Although aged but seventeen when he died, he had been married some two years to Mary Stuart, the young queen of Scots. This marriage had helped to raise to great power in the kingdom a family known as the Guises. They were a branch of the ducal House of Lorraine, whose duchy was at that time independent of France, and, although the father of the family, made Duke of Guise by Francis I., had become naturalized in France in 1505, his sons were looked upon as foreigners by the jealous Frenchmen whom they supplanted at Court. {1061} Of the six sons, there were two of eminence, one (the second duke of Guise) a famous general in his day, the other a powerful cardinal. Five sisters completed the family in its second generation. The elder of these, Mary, had married James V. of Scotland (whose mother was the English princess, Margaret, sister of Henry VIII.), and Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, born of that marriage, was therefore a niece of the Guises. They had brought about her marriage to Francis II., while he was dauphin, and they mounted with her to supreme influence in the kingdom when she ascended the throne with her husband. The queen-mother, Catherine de' Medici, was as eager as the Guises to control the government, in what appeared to her eyes the interest of her children; but during the short reign of Francis II. she was quite thrust aside, and the queen's uncles ruled the state.

The death of Francis II. (1560) brought a change, and with the accession of Charles IX., a boy of ten years, there began a bitter contest for ascendancy between Catherine and the Guises; and this struggle became mixed and strangely complicated with a deadly conflict of religions, which the steady advance of the Reformation in France had brought at this time to a crisis.

The Huguenots.

Under the powerful leadership which Calvin assumed, at Geneva, the reformed religion in France had acquired an organized firmness and strength which not only resisted the most cruel persecution, but made rapid headway against it. "Protestantism had become a party which did not, like Lutheranism in Germany, spring up from the depths." "It numbered its chief adherents among the middle and upper grades of society, spread its roots rather among the nobles than the citizens, and among learned men and families of distinction rather than among the people." "Some of the highest aristocracy, who were discontented, and submitted unwillingly to the supremacy of the Guises, had joined the Calvinistic opposition—some undoubtedly from policy, others from conviction. The Turennes, the Rohans, and Soubises, pure nobles, who addressed the king as 'mon cousin,' especially the Bourbons, the agnates of the royal house, had adopted the new faith" (Hausser). One branch of the Bourbons had lately acquired the crown of Navarre. The Spanish part of the old Navarrese kingdom had been subjugated and absorbed by Ferdinand of Aragon; but its territory on the French side of the Pyrenees—Béarn and other counties—still maintained a half independent national existence, with the dignity of a regal government. When Margaret of Angoulême, sister of Francis I., married Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre, as mentioned before, she carried to that small court an earnest inclination towards the doctrines of the Reform. Under her protection Navarre became largely Protestant, and a place of refuge for the persecuted of France. Margaret's daughter, the famous Jeanne d'Albret, espoused the reformed faith fully, and her husband, Antoine de Bourbon, as well as Antoine's brother, Louis de Condé, found it politic to profess the same belief. For the Protestants (who were now acquiring, in some unknown way, the name of Huguenots) had become so numerous and so compactly organized as to form a party capable of being wielded with great effect, in the strife of court factions which the rivalry of Catherine and the Guises produced. Hence politics and religion were inextricably confused in the civil wars which broke out shortly after the death of Francis II. (1560), and the accession of the boy king, Charles IX. These wars belong to a different movement in the general current of European events, and we will return to them after a glance at the religious Reformation, and at the political circumstances connected with it, in England and elsewhere.

England.

Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, made king of England by his victory at Bosworth, established himself so firmly in the seat of power that three successive rebellions failed to disturb him. In one of these (1487) a pretender, Lambert Simnel, was put forward, who claimed to be the Earl of Warwick. In another (1491-1497) a second pretender, Perkin Warbeck, personated one of the young princes whom Richard III. had caused to be murdered in the tower. Neither of the impostures had much success in the kingdom. Henry VII. was not a popular king, but he was able and strong, and he solidified all the bases of monarchical independence which circumstances had enabled Edward IV. to begin laying down.

It was in the reign of Henry that America was discovered, and he might have been the patron of Columbus, the beneficiary of the great voyage, and the proprietor and lord of the grand realm which Isabella and Ferdinand secured. But he lacked the funds or the faith—apparently both—and put aside his unequaled opportunity. When the field of westward exploration had been opened, however, he was early in entering it, and sent the Cabots upon those voyages which gave England her claim to the North American coasts.

During the reign of Henry VII. there were two quiet marriages in his family which strangely influenced subsequent history. One was the marriage, in 1501, of the king's eldest son, Arthur, to Catherine of Aragon, youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. The other, in 1503, united the king's daughter, Margaret, to James IV., King of Scotland. It was through this latter marriage that the inheritance of the English crown passed to the Scottish House of Stuart, exactly one hundred years later, upon the failure of the direct line of descent in the Tudor family. The first marriage, of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, was soon dissolved by the death of the prince, in 1502. Seven years afterwards the widowed Catherine married her late husband's brother, just after he became Henry VIII., King of England, upon the death of his father, in 1509. Whence followed notable consequences which will presently appear.

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Henry VIII. and his breach with Rome.

It was the ambition of Henry VIII. to play a conspicuous part in European affairs; and as England was rich and strong, and as the king had obtained nearly the absoluteness of the crown in France, the parties to the great contests then going on were all eagerly courting his alliance. His ambitions ran parallel, too, with those of the able minister, Thomas Wolsey, who rose to high influence at his side soon after his reign began. Wolsey aspired to the Papal crown, with the cardinal's cap as a preparatory adornment, and he drew England, as we have seen, into the stormy politics of the sixteenth century in Europe, with no gain, of glory or otherwise, to the nation, and not much result of any kind. When the Emperor Maximilian died, in 1519, Henry entered the lists against Maximilian's grandson, Charles of Spain, and Francis I. of France, as a candidate for the imperial crown. In the subsequent wars which broke out between his two rivals, he took the side of the successful Charles, now Emperor, and helped him to climb to supremacy in Europe over the prostrate French king. He had dreams of conquering France again, and casting the glories of Henry V. in the shade; but he carried his enterprise little beyond the dreaming. When it was too late to check the growth of Charles' overshadowing power, he changed his side and took Francis into alliance.

But Henry's motives were always selfish and personal—never political; and the personal motives had now taken on a most despicable character. He had tired of his wife, the Spanish Catherine, who was six years older than himself. He had two pretexts for discontent with his marriage: 1, that his queen had borne him only a daughter, whereas England needed a male heir to the throne; 2, that he was troubled with scruples as to the lawfulness of wedlock with his brother's widow. On this latter ground he began intrigues to win from the Pope, not a divorce in the ordinary sense of the term, but a declaration of the nullity of his marriage. This challenged the opposition of the Emperor, Catherine's nephew, and Henry's alliances were naturally changed.

The Pope, Clement VII., refused to annul the marriage, and Henry turned his unreasoning wrath upon Cardinal Wolsey, who had conducted negotiations with the Pope and failed in them. Wolsey was driven from the Court in disgrace and died soon afterwards. He was succeeded in the king's favor by a more unscrupulous man, Thomas Cromwell. Henry had not yet despaired of bringing the Pope to compliance with his wishes; and he began attacks upon the Church and upon the papal revenues which might shake, as he hoped, the firmness of the powers at Rome. With the help of a pliant minister and a subservient Parliament, he forced the clergy (1531-1532) in Convocation to acknowledge him to be the Supreme Head of the English Church, and to submit themselves entirely to his authority. At the same time he grasped the "annates," or first year's income of bishoprics, which had been the richest perquisite of the papal treasury. In all these proceedings, the English king was acting on a line parallel to that of the continental rising against Rome; but it was not in friendliness toward it nor in sympathy with it that he did so. He had been among the bitterest enemies of the Reformation, and he never ceased to be so. He had won from the Pope the empty title of "Defender of the Faith," by a foolish book against Luther, and the faith which he defended in 1521 was the faith in which he died. But when he found that the influence of Charles V. at Rome was too great to be overcome, and that the Pope could be neither bribed, persuaded nor coerced to sanction the putting away of his wife, he resolved to make the English Church sufficient in authority to satisfy his demand, by establishing its ecclesiastical independence, with a pontiff of its own, in himself. He purposed nothing more than this. He contemplated no change of doctrine, no cleansing of abuses. He permitted no one whose services he commanded in the undertaking to bring such changes into contemplation. So far as concerned Henry's initiative, there was absolutely nothing of religious Reformation in the movement which separated the Church of England from the Church of Rome. It accomplished its sole original end when it gave finality to the decree of an English ecclesiastical court, on the question of the king's marriage, and barred queen Catherine's appeal from it. It was the intention of Henry VIII. that the Church under his papacy should remain precisely what it had been under the Pope at Rome, and he spared neither stake nor gibbet in his persecuting zeal against impudent reformers.

But the spirit of Reformation which was in the atmosphere of that time lent itself, nevertheless, to King Henry's project, and made that practicable which could hardly have been so a generation before. The influence of Wyclif had never wholly died out; the new learning was making its way in England and broadening men's minds; the voice of Luther and his fellow workers on the continent had been heard, and not vainly. England was ripe for the religious revolution, and her king promoted it, without intention. But while his reign lasted, and his despotism was heavy on the land, there was nothing accomplished but the breaking of the old Church fetters, and the binding of the nation anew with green withes, which, presently, it would burst asunder.

The conspicuous events of Henry's reign are familiarly known. Most of them bear the stamp of his monstrous egotism and selfishness. He was the incomparable tyrant of English history. The monarch who repudiated two wives, sent two to the block, and shared his bed with yet two more; who made a whole national church the servant of his lusts, and who took the lives of the purest men of his kingdom when they would not bend their consciences to say that he did well—has a pedestal quite his own in the gallery of infamous kings.

Edward VI. and the Reformation.