§ 3 Social and Political Results
On the side of daily life, it fared with Protestantism as with the early Church: where it was warred upon it was socially circumspect; where it had easier course it was lax. Thus we have the express admissions of Luther and of Calvin that under Protestantism they found less spirituality around them than there had been under Romanism; and there is abundant evidence that the first effect of the new regimen in Germany was to promote what Catholic and Protestant teachers alike professed to think the most serious form of immorality—sexual licence. In point of fact, Luther’s own doctrines of predestination and grace were a species of unbought indulgences, sure to injure good morals, even apart from the effect of a free use of the Bible as a working code. Some of Luther’s fellow-preachers justified and practised bigamy; and he and his colleagues not only counselled Henry VIII to marry a second time without divorcing his first queen, but gave their official consent, albeit reluctantly, to such a proceeding on the part of the Landgrave of Hesse. Among the common people, the new sense of freedom quickly gave a religious impulse to the lamentable Peasants’ War, and later to the so-called Anabaptist movement, which, though it contained elements of sincerity and virtue that are not always acknowledged, amounted in the main to a movement of moral and social chaos.
Luther, during whose time of hiding in the Wartburg (1521–22) the new ferment began at Wittemberg, came thither to denounce it as a work of Satan; but it was a sequel of his own action. The new leaders, Storch and Münzer and Carlstadt, had turned as he had advised to the Bible, and there they found texts for whatever they were minded to try, from image-smashing to the plunder and burning of monasteries and castles, and a general effort at social revolution. In all they did, they declared and believed they were moved by the Spirit of God. Luther had done this service to Catholicism, that his course led to the practical proof that the Bible, put in the hands of the multitude as the sufficient guide to conduct, wrought far more harm than good. Peasant revolts, indeed, had repeatedly occurred in Germany before his time, the gross tyranny of the nobles provoking them; but the religious frenzy of Münzer gave to the rising of 1524–25 in Swabia and Franconia, though the formulated demands of the insurgents were just and reasonable, a character of wildness and violence seldom seen before. Luther, accordingly, to save his own position, vehemently denounced the rising, and hounded on the nobles to its bloody suppression, a work in which they needed no urging. His protector, the wise Frederick of Saxony, then on his deathbed, gave no such evil counsel, but advised moderation, and admitted the guilt of his order towards the common people. The end was, however, that at least 100,000 peasants were slain; and the lot of those left was worse than before. The later Anabaptist movement, which set up a short-lived republic (1535) in the city of Münster in Westphalia, and spread to Holland, was too destitute of political sanity to gain any but visionaries, and was everywhere put down with immense bloodshed.
Yet vaster social and political evils were to come from the Reformation. In 1526, at the Diet of Spires, the emperor Charles V called for strong measures against Lutheranism, but was firmly resisted by the new Elector of Saxony and the other Lutheran princes, whereupon the emperor waived his claim, not caring to raise a war in the pope’s interest; and it was agreed that each head of a State in the empire should take his own way in regard to religion, his subjects being at his disposal. It was at this stage that the German Reformation began its most decisive progress. In the next few years the papal party, backed by the Emperor, twice carried decrees rescinding that of 1526. First came the decree of the second Diet of Spires (1529). Against this a formal protest was made to the emperor by the Lutheran princes and a number of the free imperial cities of Germany and Switzerland, whence arose first the title of “Protestants.” In 1530 the emperor convened a fresh Diet at Augsburg, to which the Lutherans were required to bring a formal Confession of Faith. This was framed on conciliatory lines; but the emperor issued a fresh coercive decree, whereupon the Germans formed the defensive League of Smalkald, from which the Swiss were excluded on their refusal to sign the Augsburg Confession. At this stage the invasion of Austria by the Turks delayed civil war, so that Luther was able to die in peace (1546). Then war began, and the Protestant League was quickly and thoroughly overthrown by the emperor. After a few years, however, the imperial tyranny, exercised through Spanish troops, forced a revolt of the Protestant princes, who with the help of France defeated Charles (1552). Now was effected the Peace of Augsburg (signed 1555), which left the princes as before to determine at their own will whether their States should be Lutheran or Catholic, and entitled them to keep what Church lands they had confiscated before 1552. No protection whatever was decreed for Calvinists, with whom the Lutherans had long been at daggers drawn, and who had not yet gained much ground in Germany.
Such a peace failed to settle the vital question as to whether in future the Protestant princes could make further confiscations, on the plea of the conversion of Catholic bishops and abbots or otherwise. As the century wore on, accordingly, the princes “secularized” many more Church estates; and as Protestantism was all the while losing moral ground in Germany through the adoption of Calvinism by several princes, and the bitter quarrels of the sects and sub-sects, the Catholics held the more strongly to their view of the Augsburg treaty, which was that all bishoprics and abbeys held directly from the emperor were to remain Catholic. Friction grew from decade to decade, and, civic wisdom making no progress on either side, a number of the Lutherans and Calvinists at length formed (1608) a militant union, led by the Calvinist prince Christian of Anhalt, to defend their gains; and the Catholics, led by Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, formed another. The Calvinists were the chief firebrands; and Christian was bent on aggression, to the end of upsetting the power of the Catholic House of Austria.
The train, however, was fired from Bohemia, where the Protestant nobles were at odds with their two successive kings, Matthias and Ferdinand, both of that house, and both bent on putting down Protestantism on the crown lands. The nobles began a revolt in a brutally lawless fashion; and when, in a winter pause of the war, Ferdinand was elected emperor (1619), they deposed him from the throne of Bohemia, and elected in his place the Calvinist prince Frederick, Elector Palatine (son-in-law of James I of England), who foolishly accepted. The capable Maximilian, with Tilly for general, took the field on behalf of Ferdinand; the Lutheran princes stood aloof from Frederick, who for his own part had offended his Lutheran subjects by slighting their rites; his few allies could not sustain him, and he was easily defeated and put to headlong flight. At once the leading Protestant nobles of Bohemia were put to death; their lands were confiscated; the clergy of the chief Protestant body, the Bohemian Brethren, dating back to the time of Huss, were expelled in mass; and Protestantism in Bohemia was soon practically at an end. Many of both the Lutheran and Calvinist churches, in their resentment at the slackness of the German Protestant League, voluntarily went over to Catholicism. At the same period the Protestant Prince of Transylvania had been in alliance with the Turks to attack Vienna; and the Protestant faith was thus discredited on another side.
Meantime, however, the Thirty Years’ War had begun. Frederick’s general, Mansfeld, held out for him in the Palatinate; the dissolution of the army of the Protestant Union supplied him with fresh soldiers, content to live by plunder; English volunteers and new German allies joined; and the struggle went from bad to worse. The failure or defeat of the first Protestant combatants brought others upon the scene; James of England appealed to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Christian IV of Denmark to join him in recovering the Palatinate for his son-in-law, and, unable to subsidize Gustavus as he required, made terms with Christian, who at once entered the war. Thereupon the emperor employed Wallenstein, and the Protestants were defeated and hard pressed, till the great Gustavus came to their aid. Under his masterly leadership they regained their ground, but could not decisively triumph. After his death at the battle of Lützen (1632) new developments took place, France entering the imbroglio by way of weakening her enemies Austria and Spain, the two pillars of the empire; and one period of war passed into another without stay or respite.
In the course of this inconceivable struggle children grew to middle age, and men grew from youth to grey hairs; most of those who began the strife passed away ere it had ended; the French Richelieu rose to greatness and died; and the English Civil War passed through nearly its whole course, a mere episode in comparison. When at length there was signed the Peace of Westphalia (1648) the German world was reduced to mortal exhaustion. The armies on both sides had been to the common people as the monstrous dragons of fable, bestial devourers, dealing ruin to friend and foe alike. Every sack of a city was a new triumph of cruelty and wickedness; tortures were inflicted by the mercenaries which almost redeemed the name of the Inquisition; and, as of old in the Ireland of Elizabeth’s day, peasants were found dead with grass in their mouths. According to some calculations, half of the entire population of Germany was gone; and it is certain that in many districts numbers and wealth, man and beast, had been reduced in a much greater proportion, whole provinces being denuded of live stock, and whole towns going to ruin. German civilization had been thrown back a full hundred years, morally and materially. No such procession of brutality and vice as followed the armies of Tilly and Wallenstein had been seen since the first Crusade; and the generation which had seen them and been able to survive them was itself grown callous. Capacity, culture, and conduct had alike fallen below the levels of a century before.
By the Peace of Westphalia were settled the boundaries of the two creeds which had thus battled for a whole generation. In Germany proselytism was at an end; but the States whose princes had been Protestant remained so, they and their Catholic neighbours keeping the right to impose their faith on their subjects. Protestantism had gained nothing beyond rooting Catholicism more completely out of Protestant States; and, on the other hand, the Catholics had rooted heresy out of theirs. No racial dividing-line subsisted. Teutonic Bavaria and Austria remained Catholic, as the five original Teutonic cantons of Switzerland had done from the first; and between Lutherans and Calvinists, of whatever stock, there remained a sullen doctrinal division. Bohemia had been lost to Protestantism, and Poland was now far on the way to the same fate.
The diverse cases of Poland and France here supply yet another lesson in economic causation. In France at the accession of Henry IV the Protestants were a very strong party, including many of the nobles, though a minority of the nation; in Poland, at the accession of Sigismund III, in 1586, they were considerably stronger. Within half-a-century they were in full decadence in both countries, from similar causes. Sigismund (the cousin of Gustavus Adolphus), though grandson of the Protestant Gustavus Vasa of Sweden, had been bred a Catholic with a view to his inheriting the Polish crown; and from the day of his accession he set himself to the aggrandizement of his creed. He thereby lost the crown of Sweden, but he went far to make Poland Catholic; and the newly constituted order of Jesuits did the rest. To the Polish crown belonged the right of conferring life appointments to which were attached great tracts of crown land; and the constant use of this economic force for Catholicism during a long reign began the downfall of the Protestantism of the nobility, who, though including many men of superior capacity, had been moved as usual by the economic motive in their heresy. The complete ascendancy of the Jesuits during the seventeenth century ultimately wrought the ruin of Poland, their policy having expelled the Protestants, alienated the Cossacks, who belonged to the Greek Church, and paralyzed the intellectual life of the nation.
In France the decay of Protestantism was caused substantially by economic means. When Richelieu obtained power the Huguenot party was strong, turbulent, intolerant, and aggressive. Practising on the one hand a firm political control, and on the other a strict tolerance, he began the policy of detaching the ablest nobles from the Huguenot interest by giving them positions of the highest honour and trust, the holding of which soon reconciled them to the court. Thus deprived of leaders who were men of the world, the Huguenot party fell into the hands of its fanatical clergy, under whose guidance it became more aggressive, and so provoked fresh civil war. The balance of military power being now easily on the side of the crown, the revolts were decisively put down; and the policy of anti-ecclesiasticism and toleration, persisted in by Richelieu and carried on after him by Mazarin, prevented any further strife. Thus French Protestantism was irretrievably on the decline when Louis XIV, reverting to the politics of Catholic bigotry, and not content with setting on foot cruel persecutions which drove many from the country despite the laws against emigration, committed the immense and criminal blunder of revoking the Edict of Nantes (1685), and so expelling from France the remnant of the Huguenots. He had been advised that the refusal of liberty of worship would bring them to the Church, and that they could be hindered from emigrating. On the contrary, his plan lost to France fifty thousand families of industrious inhabitants, whose Protestantism had ceased to be turbulent, though it remained austere; and by thus grievously weakening a kingdom already heavily bled by his wars, the French king prepared his own military humiliation, and the consequent depression of his Church. It must always be remembered, however, that his course was acclaimed by the élite of Catholic culture.
The alarm and resentment set up by his act counted for much in stirring the English people three years later to resist their Romanizing king James II, who, had he gone his way more prudently, might have done much to rehabilitate Catholicism in virtue of the fanatical devotion to the throne already developed by the reaction against the Puritan rebellion. On the other hand, the tyrannous policy which had kept Ireland Catholic, by identifying Protestantism with oppression, and Catholicism with the national memories, was cruelly carried on by England, with the result of maintaining a perpetual division between the two countries, and preparing a great source of Catholic population for the United States in a later age. The profound decivilization inflicted on Ireland by Protestant England is probably the greatest of the social and political evils resulting from the Reformation; but the persecution of dissenters in England, and the more savage dragooning of Presbyterians in Scotland under Charles II and James II (which had an excuse in the aggressive intolerance of the Covenanters) must go to the same account. Nowhere, not even in Protestant Switzerland—save in the case of Zurich, well led by Zwingli, and in that of the Grisons, where Catholics and Protestants agreed to abolish feudal abuses—did the Reformation work social betterment for the common people. In England the tyranny of the Protestant nobles under Edward VI was both corrupt and cruel; and the Norfolk rising of 1549 was as savagely suppressed as that of Wat Tyler had been in Catholic times.
In the processes by which Protestantism lost ground, as in those by which Catholicism counteracted its own successes, there was a considerable play of intellectual forces, which we shall consider apart. But though the economic, the political, and the intellectual forces always interact, the two former have had a potency which has thus far been little acknowledged. It is essential to realize that they have affected the movement of thought more than they have been affected by it; and above all that they, and not the imaginary bias of race, have determined the total fortunes of the Reformation.