§ 2 Political and Economic Forces
Even the grievance of indulgence-selling, which gave the immediate impulse to Luther’s action, was an economic as well as a moral question. Many of the best Catholics were entirely at one with him and such of his predecessors as Wesel and Wessel in deploring and denouncing the form the traffic had taken. The process of farming out the sale of indulgences to districts, as governments farmed out the taxes, was enough to stagger all men capable of independent judgment; and the expedition of the Dominican monk Tetzel had reduced it to something like burlesque. Yet it was typical of what papal administration had become. Archbishop Albert of Mayence and Magdeburg, who was also margrave of Brandenburg, owed the pope the usual large sum for his investiture, and could not pay. The pope, Leo X, greatly needed money for his building outlays; and the supreme prince of the Church gave to the lesser permission to set up in his province a vigorous trade in indulgences. For this trade Tetzel was selected, not by the pope but by the archbishop, as a notoriously suitable tool. Albert in turn made a financial arrangement with the great German banking house of Fuggers, and their agent accompanied Tetzel to take care of the cash. Thus, though the transaction was strictly a German one, the procedure was externally one of bleeding a German province, through its superstition, in the financial interest of Rome. Well-informed people knew that the papal agent carried off at least the archbishop’s debt; and others might plausibly surmise that there had gone a million thalers more, as the takings had been abnormally great.
Obviously the mass of the citizens were superstitious believers, otherwise the traffic could not have gone on; and Luther in his pulpit began merely by opposing the abuse of the practice, not the canonical principle. In absolution, he correctly argued, there were according to the established doctrine three elements—contrition, confession, and remission of penalties; and indulgences could effect only the third. He accordingly refused to absolve any on the mere ground of an indulgence; whereupon Tetzel, finding his traffic thus ostensibly hampered, preached against him, and the historic battle began. The theses nailed to the Wittemberg church door by Luther (1517) did not assail the Church or the pope; they simply challenged on orthodox lines the abuse of indulgences; and when Luther began to publish his views he expressed himself with perfect submission to the pope.
What won him the support of a vigorous popular party, albeit a minority, and of a sufficient section of the nobility, was in the first place his courage, and in the second place the growing restiveness of the Germans as such under what was practically an Italian domination. In past history, the “Germanic empire” had been wont to lord it over Italy on feudal grounds, and it was always a sore point with many that Italy none the less received an increasing tribute from Germany as from other States. The blunder of the papacy in Luther’s case lay in not realizing how far such feelings, in connection with a fresh scandal, might go in setting up a northern tide of anti-Roman animus. So long wont to brow-beat all insubordination, and to decide doctrinal disputes by fiat instead of by persuasion, it either prescribed or permitted to its agents the usual tone in their dealings with Luther; and finally the pope thought to clinch matters by a bull (1520) against his doctrines, giving him his choice between submission and excommunication. His defiance, and the act of excommunication, duly followed, and the Protestant Church began.
Even now the papacy, witless of new developments, could very well suppose the new heresy transient. Charles V, the new Emperor, was thoroughly orthodox; and not many of the German nobles were ostensibly otherwise. But Charles was under a deep obligation to Frederick the Elector of Saxony for his election; and Frederick was one of those who had begun, for racial and financial reasons, to contemplate “home rule” in matters ecclesiastical. Frederick accordingly was allowed to protect Luther, whose courage in going to the Diet of Worms, with Huss’s fate in common memory, further established his popular influence. Manhood always loves manhood. After 1526, however, the process of the Reformation in Germany was substantially one of wholesale confiscation of Church lands and goods by the nobles, who were thus irrevocably committed to the cause; and though Luther and his more single-minded colleagues were naturally disgusted, there was no other way in which they could have won, popular sympathy counting for nothing in such a matter without military force.
A rupture took place, finally, between the Emperor and the new Medicean pope, Clement VII, over the desperate politics of Italy, the papacy for once taking a national course in resisting an imperialist invasion. But the invaders triumphed; Italy was overrun anew; Rome was sacked (1527) with all the atrocity which historically distinguishes the Christian conquests of the city from those of the ancient Gauls and Goths; and during the critical years of the establishment of Protestantism the emperor was in no mood to quarrel with his German friends in the interests of a pope whose friendship he could not trust. All the political conditions were thus abnormally favourable to the Lutheran movement. At the same time, every menace from Rome led naturally to intensification of the Lutheran heresy; and though it always remained nearer Catholicism than did Calvinism, it emphasized more and more its differences.
In the meantime the success of the movement of Zwingli at Zurich had proved independently that the strength of the Reformation lay in its appeal to economic interest. Confiscation of the possessions of the Church by the municipal authorities was a first step, and one for which, once taken, the community would fight rather than revoke it. With signal unwisdom, the Roman curia had contrived to allot most of the Swiss town livings to Italians, so that the vested interests were alien and not local. The municipality, on the other hand, sagaciously pacified those interests by guaranteeing pensions or posts as teachers or preachers to the whole twenty-four cantons of the chapter; and there and in some other cantons the economic Reformation, thus effected, was permanent.
In the case of England, on the other hand, the primary factor in the repudiation of papal rule was the personal insistence of Henry VIII on a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, the aunt of the emperor, Charles V. Henry was so far from being inclined to Protestantism that he caused to be compiled by his bishops (1521) a treatise in reply to Luther, to which he put his name, thereupon receiving from Leo X the title of “Defender of the Faith.” To the very last, he burned doctrinal Protestants as heretics, and despite revival of the old Lollard propaganda the country remained substantially Catholic in creed. But when it came to the king’s demand for a divorce, the new pope, Clement VII, was in a hopeless dilemma, since if he granted the request, which he was personally and theologically not unwilling to do, he would exasperate the emperor Charles, of whom he dreaded to make an irreconcilable enemy, besides offending the whole Catholicism of Spain and even much of that of England. When once Henry decided to take ecclesiastical rule into his own hands he found that, little as he liked the new doctrines, he must in his own interest proceed to confiscate Church lands and bestow the bulk of them on adherents, thereby establishing a firm anti-papal interest. So little way did positive Protestant doctrine make that when his daughter Mary came to the throne, though she dared not try to resume the Church lands, the people were in substantial sympathy with her faith, and only her marriage with Philip and her persecution of heretics turned any large number against her. Even under Elizabeth it was the new national enmity to Spain, and not religious propaganda, that made the bulk of the people Protestant in creed and worship.
The process of the Reformation in Scotland clearly follows the economic law. So late as 1535 Scotland was so Catholic in belief, despite the usual grievances against priestly rapacity and luxury, that the parliament passed a law forbidding all importation of the writings of Luther, and all discussion of his “damnable opinions.” But as soon as the English king by his confiscation of the rich monastery lands (1536–39) showed the Scots nobles how they might enrich themselves by turning Protestant, they began to favour heresy; and from the death (1542) of the last Catholic king, James V, throughout the minority of his daughter Mary, they protected the reforming preachers. In 1543 began the wrecking of monasteries by mobs; in 1546 was assassinated Cardinal Beaton, who had taken active steps to destroy heresy; and though the ferocious war with England delayed developments, as did the regency of the Queen’s French mother, the preaching of Calvinism by John Knox and others carried enough of the townspeople to make easy the passing, in 1560, of an Act which made Protestantism the established religion of the country. As usual, by far the greater part of the plunder went to the landowning class, who brazenly broke all their promises of endowment to the preachers. But the latter had perforce to submit, indignant as they were; and when the young Catholic queen Mary arrived in 1561 she found a Protestant kingdom, in which the most powerful class was rich with church spoils. Again the political and the economic forces had been the obviously determining factors in the change.
Scandinavian Protestantism, in turn, moved on the same line of economic opportunity and pressure. A popular movement seems to have begun in Denmark, but it was favoured by the throne; and the nobles, seeing the possibilities of the case, soon followed; whereupon King Christian III, who ruled both Denmark and Norway, suppressed Catholicism with the nobles’ help, and confiscated the rich possessions of the bishops. In Sweden, on the other hand, Gustavus Vasa took the initiative against the clergy, who had supported the Danish rule which he succeeded in throwing off; and he naturally had with him the mass of the laity, especially when he gave the nobles leave to reclaim the lands that had been granted by their ancestors to the monasteries. Doctrinal Protestantism followed in the wake of confiscation.
The Protestantism of Holland, again, was plainly the result of the mismanagement of Philip II. When Protestantism had in other countries reached its fullest extension the Low Countries were still mainly Catholic, only a few of the poorer classes having changed, apart from the Anabaptist movement, which had a much larger following; and the slaughter of such heretics by the Inquisition went on for many years with the acquiescence of the middle and upper orders. In the Netherlands the local Inquisition, conducted by natives, was positively more cruel than that of Spain. It is thus clear that there was no special bias to Protestantism in the “Teutonic” races as such. The orthodox Protestant movement entered Holland not from the German but from the French side; and it needed not only the ferocity but the rapacity of Alva to create a permanent Protestant and rationalist movement among the needy nobility. When the Protestant mobs began to resort to image-breaking they put their cause in great peril. The real reason of the slowness of the nobles to turn Protestant was, doubtless, that they had little to gain from plunder of their Church in any case, it having long been abnormally poor by reason of the restrictive policy of the Flemish and Dutch feudal princes in the past. When the rupture with Spain was complete the Church estates were scrupulously disposed of in the public interest, Dutch Protestantism being thus exceptionally clean-handed.
Philip’s attempts to enrich the priesthood were certainly part of the provocation he gave his subjects in the Netherlands; but their resentment was at the outset strictly political, not religious; and it is reasonable to say that had he chosen to reside among them and conciliate them he could easily have kept them Catholic, while in that case Spain might very well have become Protestant, and Dutch and Flemish resources would have been turned against Spanish disaffection. Even in what remained the Spanish Netherlands Catholicism entirely recovered its ground. The Teutonic Charles V had been as rigidly Catholic as his predecessors on the Spanish throne, and for the same reasons, (1) that the Church in his dominions helped him and did not thwart him; and (2) that his large revenues from the Netherlands made it unnecessary for him to plunder the Church as did the Scandinavian kings and Henry VIII.
In the case of France, where Protestantism reached its highest development in point of intellectual and militant energy, but became stationary after a generation of desperate strife, and later decayed, the play of political and economic causation is little less clear. There, as has been said, there was much less ostensible pressure of wealth-seeking interest on the side of the Reformation than in Germany and elsewhere; yet so far as the nobles were concerned an economic motive was certainly at work. At the outset of his reign Francis I had won from the pope, practically at the sword’s point, the concession (1516) of the right to appoint bishops and abbots, the papacy in return receiving the annates, or first year’s revenue. The result was that the Gallican Church was at least as corrupt as any other section of the fold, its dignities being usually bestowed on court favourites, whose exactions exasperated the rural gentry as much as those of papal nominees would have done. The throne being strong, however, and the king having no special financial motive to go further, the cause of reform had no help from his side. Had he turned “reformer,” as he once had some thought of doing, he could probably have made France Protestant with less difficulty than Henry VIII met with in England; but in view of the political divisions set up by Lutheranism in Germany he decided against the new propaganda.
That, nevertheless, proceeded. There had always been keen criticism of the Church in France; and as early as 1512 there began at Meaux a reform movement on substantially Protestant lines, under the auspices of the local bishop. He, however, was put down by the threats of the college of the Sorbonne, the ecclesiastical faculty of the university of Paris; and the first notable signs of anti-Romanism came from the Vaudois of Provence, a small population who had been settled there after the virtual extermination of their predecessors of the same name and stock in the thirteenth century, and who were latterly found to have the same anti-clerical tendencies. Under Louis XII the Church had sought to punish them, but he refused to permit it, declaring them better people than the orthodox. Finding themselves in sympathy with the Reform movement, they sent some of their own preachers to Switzerland and Germany (1530) to learn from it, and began a similar propaganda. Decrees were issued against them in 1535 and 1540, but Francis proposed to spare them on condition that they should enter the Church of Rome. This policy failing, and Francis having made a treaty with Charles V, under which, on papal pressure, he agreed to put down heresy, the Vaudois were given up to coercion. There ensued a massacre so vile (1545) that the king, now near his end, was revolted by it, declaring that his orders had been grossly exceeded. A slow process of inquiry, left to his son, dragged on for years, but finally came to nothing.
The Vaudois had been nearly exterminated, in the old fashion; but the massacre served to proclaim and spread their doctrine, which rapidly gained ground among the skilled artisan class as well as among the nobles, the Swiss printing-presses doing it signal service. Persecution, as usual, kept pace with propaganda; and in 1557 Pope Paul IV, with the king’s approval, decreed that the Inquisition should be set up in France, where it had never yet been established. The legal “parliament” of Paris, jealous for its privileges, successfully resisted; but the Sorbonne and the Church carried on the work of heretic-burning, till at length the Huguenots were driven to arms (1562). Their name had probably come from that of the German-speaking Eidgenossen (“oath-fellows”) of Switzerland; but their doctrine was that of Calvin, who, driven from France (1533), was now long established at Geneva; and their tenacity showed the value of his close-knit dogmatism as a political inspiration. Catholic fanaticism and treachery on the one hand, and Huguenot intemperance on the other, brought about eight furious civil wars in the period 1562–94. The high-water mark of wickedness in that generation was the abominable Massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572), which followed on the third truce, and roused a new intensity of hatred. So evenly balanced were the forces that only after more than twenty years of further convulsions was the strife ended by the politic decision of the Protestant Henry of Navarre to turn Catholic and so win the crown (1594), on the score that “Paris was well worth a Mass.” He thus secured for his Protestant supporters a perfect toleration, which he confirmed by the Edict of Nantes (1597).
In Poland and Bohemia, where also Protestantism went far, on bases laid by the old movements of the Hussites, the process was at first facilitated, as in Germany, by the political conditions; and the economic motive was clearly potent. The subsequent collapse and excision of Protestantism in those countries, as in France, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, completes the proof that for the modern as for the ancient world political and economic forces are the determinants of a creed’s success or failure, culture movements being, as it were, the force of variation which they condition.