Book: A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.

C >> Carlton J. H. Hayes >> A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1.




Under Calvin's theocratic despotism, Geneva became famous throughout
Europe as the center of elaborate Protestant propaganda. Calvin, who
set the example of stern simplicity and relentless activity, was
sometimes styled the Protestant pope. He not only preached every day,
wrote numerous theological treatises, and issued a French translation
of the Bible, but he established important Protestant schools--
including the University of Geneva--which attracted students from
distant lands, and he conducted a correspondence with his disciples and
would-be reformers in all points of Europe. His letters alone would
fill thirty folio volumes.

[Sidenote: Diffusion of Calvinism]

Such activities account for the almost bewildering diffusion of
Calvinism. French, Dutch, Germans, Scotch, and English flocked to
Geneva to hear Calvin or to attend his schools, and when they returned
to their own countries they were likely to be so many glowing sparks
ready to start mighty conflagrations.

Calvinism was known by various names in the different countries which
it entered. On the continent of Europe it was called the Reformed
Faith, and in France its followers were styled Huguenots; in Scotland
it became Presbyterianism; and in England, Puritanism. Its essential
characteristics, however, remained the same wherever it was carried.

[Sidenote: Calvinism in Switzerland]

We have already noticed how Switzerland, except for the five forest
cantons, had been converted to Protestantism by the preaching of
Zwingli. Calvin was Zwingli's real theological successor, and the
majority of the Swiss, especially those in the urban cantons of Zuerich
and Bern as well as of Geneva, cheerfully accepted Calvinism.

[Sidenote: Calvinism in France: the Huguenots]

Calvinism also made converts in France. The doctrines and writings of
Luther had there encountered small success. Many French reformers
believed that greater good would eventually be achieved within the
Catholic Church than without. There appeared to be fewer abuses among
the French clergy than among the ecclesiastics of northern Europe, for
they possessed less wealth and power. The French sovereign felt less
prompted to lay his hand upon the dominions of the clergy, because a
special agreement with the pope in 1516 bestowed upon the king the
nomination of bishops and the disposition of benefices. For these
reasons the bulk of the French people resisted Protestantism of every
form and remained loyally Catholic.

What progress the new religion made in France was due to Calvin rather
than to Luther. Calvin, as we have seen, was a Frenchman himself, and
his teachings and logic appealed to a small but influential body of his
fellow-countrymen. A considerable portion of the lower nobility, a few
merchants and business men, and many magistrates conformed to Calvinism
openly; the majority of great lawyers and men of learning adhered to it
in public or in secret. Probably from a twentieth to a thirtieth of the
total population embraced Calvinism. The movement was essentially
confined to the middle-class or _bourgeoisie_, and almost from the
outset it acquired a political as well as a religious significance. It
represented among the lesser nobility an awakening of the aristocratic
spirit and among the middle-class a reaction against the growing power
of the king. The financial and moneyed interests of the country were
largely attracted to French Calvinism. The Huguenots, as the French
Calvinists were called, were particularly strong in the law courts and
in the Estates-General or parliament, and these had been the main
checks upon royal despotism.

[Sidenote: Edict of Nantes]

The Huguenots were involved in sanguinary civil and religious wars
which raged in France throughout the greater part of the sixteenth
century and which have already been treated in their appropriate
political aspect. The outcome was the settlement accorded by King Henry
IV in the famous Edict of Nantes (1598), which contained the following
provisions: (1) Private worship and liberty of conscience were allowed
to the Calvinists throughout France; (2) Public Protestant worship
might be held in 200 enumerated towns and over 3000 castles; (3) A
financial grant was made to Protestant schools, and the publication of
Calvinist books was legalized; (4) Huguenots received full civil
rights, with admission to all public offices; (5) Huguenots were
granted for eight years the political control of two hundred towns, the
garrisons of which were to be maintained by the crown; and (6)
Huguenots were accorded certain judicial privileges and the right of
holding religious and political assemblies. For nearly a hundred years
France practiced a religious toleration which was almost unique among
European nations, and it was Calvinists who benefited.

[Sidenote: Calvinism in the Netherlands]

The Netherlands were too near the Germanies not to be affected by the
Lutheran revolt against the Catholic Church. And the northern or Dutch
provinces became quite thoroughly saturated with Lutheranism and also
with the doctrines of various radical sects that from time to time were
expelled from the German states. The Emperor Charles V tried to stamp
out heresy by harsh action of the Inquisition, but succeeded only in
changing its name and nature. Lutheranism disappeared from the
Netherlands; but in its place came Calvinism, [Footnote: Many
Anabaptist refugees from Germany had already sought refuge in the
Netherlands: they naturally found the teachings of Zwingli and Calvin
more radical, and therefore more appropriate to themselves, than the
teachings of Luther. This fact also serves to explain the acceptance of
Calvinism in regions of southern Germany where Lutheranism, since the
Peasants' Revolt, had failed to take root.] descending from Geneva
through Alsace and thence down the Rhine, or entering from Great
Britain by means of the close commercial relations existing between
those countries. While the southern Netherlands eventually were
recovered for Catholicism, the protracted political and economic
conflict which the northern Netherlands waged against the Catholic king
of Spain contributed to a final fixing of Calvinism as the national
religion of patriotic Dutchmen. Calvinism in Holland was known as the
Dutch Reformed religion.

[Sidenote: Calvinism in Southern Germany]

We have already noted that southern Germany had rejected aristocratic
Lutheranism, partially at least because of Luther's bitter words to the
peasants. Catholicism, however, was not destined to have complete sway
in those regions, for democratic Calvinism permeated Wuerttemberg,
Baden, and the Rhenish provinces, and the Reformed doctrines gained
numerous converts among the middle-class. The growth of Calvinism in
Germany was seriously handicapped by the religious settlement of
Augsburg in 1555 which officially tolerated only Catholicism and
Lutheranism. It was not until after the close of the direful Thirty
Years' War in the seventeenth century that German Calvinists received
formal recognition.

[Sidenote: Scotland]

Scotland, like every other European country in the early part of the
sixteenth century, had been a place of protest against moral and
financial abuses in the Catholic Church, but the beginnings of
ecclesiastical rebellion are to be traced rather to political causes.
The kingdom had long been a prey to the bitter rivalry of great noble
families, and the premature death of James V (1542), which left the
throne to his ill-fated infant daughter, Mary Stuart, gave free rein to
a feudal reaction against the crown. In general, the Catholic clergy
sided with the royal cause, while the religious reformers egged on the
nobles to champion Protestantism in order to deal an effective blow
against the union of the altar and the throne. Thus Cardinal Beaton,
head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, ordered numerous executions on
the score of protecting religion and the authority of the queen-regent;
on the other hand several noblemen, professing the new theology,
assassinated the cardinal and hung his body on the battlements of the
castle of St. Andrews (1546). Such was the general situation in
Scotland when John Knox appeared upon the scene.

[Sidenote: John Knox]

Born of peasant parents about 1515, John Knox [Footnote: John Knox (c.
1515-1572).] had become a Catholic priest, albeit in sympathy with many
of the revolutionary ideas which were entering Scotland from the
Continent and from England. In 1546 he openly rejected the authority of
the Church and proceeded to preach "the Gospel" and a stern puritanical
morality. "Others snipped the branches," he said, "he struck at the
root." But the Catholic court was able to banish Knox from Scotland.
After romantic imprisonment in France, Knox spent a few years in
England, preaching an extreme puritanism, holding a chaplaincy under
Edward VI (1547-1553), and exerting his influence to insure an
indelibly Protestant character to the Anglican Church. Then upon the
accession to the English throne of the Catholic Mary Tudor, Knox betook
himself to Geneva where he made the acquaintance of Calvin and found
himself in essential agreement with the teachings of the French
reformer.

[Sidenote: Calvinism in Scotland]

After a stay of some five years on the Continent, Knox returned finally
to Scotland and became the organizer and director of the "Lords of the
Congregation," a league of the chief Protestant noblemen for purposes
of religious propaganda and political power. In 1560 he drew up the
creed and discipline of the Presbyterian Church after the model of
Calvin's church at Geneva; and in the same year with the support of the
"Lords of the Congregation" and the troops of Queen Elizabeth of
England, Knox effected a political and religious revolution in
Scotland. The queen-regent was imprisoned and the subservient
parliament abolished the papal supremacy and enacted the death penalty
against any one who should even attend Catholic worship. John Knox had
carried everything before him.

Mary Stuart, during her brief stay in Scotland (1561-1567), tried in
vain to stem the tide. The jealous barons would brook no increase of
royal authority. The austere Knox hounded the girl-queen in public
sermons and fairly flayed her character. The queen's downfall and
subsequent long imprisonment in England finally decided the
ecclesiastical future of Scotland. Except in a few fastnesses in the
northern highlands, where Catholicism survived among the clansmen, the
whole country was committed to Calvinism.

[Sidenote: Calvinism in England]

Calvinism was not without influence in England. Introduced towards the
close of the reign of Henry VIII, it gave rise to a number of small
sects which troubled the king's Anglican Church almost as much as did
the Roman Catholics. Under Edward VI (1547-1553), it considerably
influenced the theology of the Anglican Church itself, but the moderate
policies of Elizabeth (1558-1603) tended to fix an inseparable gulf
between Anglicans and Calvinists. Thenceforth, Calvinism lived in
England, in the forms of Presbyterianism, Independency, [Footnote:
Among the "Independents" were the Baptists, a sect related not so
immediately to Calvinism as to the radical Anabaptists of Germany. See
above, pp. 134 f., 145, footnotes] and Puritanism, as the religion
largely of the commercial middle class. It was treated with contempt,
and even persecuted, by Anglicans, especially by the monarchs of the
Stuart family. After a complete but temporary triumph under Cromwell,
in the seventeenth century, it was at length legally tolerated in
England after the settlement of 1689. It was from England that New
England received the Calvinistic religion which dominated colonial
forefathers of many present-day Americans.


ANGLICANISM

Anglicanism is the name frequently applied to that form of
Protestantism which stamped the state church in England in the
sixteenth century and which is now represented by the Episcopal Church
in the United States as well as by the established Church of England.
The Methodist churches are comparatively late off-shoots of
Anglicanism.

The separation of England from the papacy was a more gradual and
halting process than were the contemporary revolutions on the
Continent; and the new Anglicanism was correspondingly more
conservative than Lutheranism or Calvinism.

[Sidenote: English Catholicism in 1500]
[Sidenote: Church of England]

At the opening of the sixteenth century, the word "Catholic" meant the
same in England as in every other country of western or central Europe
--belief in the seven sacraments, the sacrifice of the Mass, and the
veneration of saints; acceptance of papal supremacy and support of
monasticism and of other institutions and practices of the medieval
Church. During several centuries it had been customary in legal
documents to refer to the Catholic Church in England as the _Ecclesia
Anglicana_, or Anglican Church, just as the popes in their letters
repeatedly referred to the "Gallican Church," the "Spanish Church," the
"Neapolitan Church," or the "Hungarian Church." But such phraseology
did not imply a separation of any one national church from the common
Catholic communion, and for nearly a thousand years--ever since there
had been an _Ecclesia Anglicana_--the English had recognized the
bishop of Rome as the center of Catholic unity. In the course of the
sixteenth century, however, the great majority of Englishmen changed
their conception of the _Ecclesia Anglicana_, so that to them it
continued to exist as the Church of England, but henceforth on a
strictly national basis, in communion neither with the pope nor with
the Orthodox Church of the East nor with the Lutherans or Calvinists,
abandoning several doctrines that had been universally held in earlier
times and substituting in their place beliefs and customs which were
distinctively Protestant. This new conception of the Anglican Church--
resulting from the revolution in the sixteenth century--is what we mean
by Anglicanism as a form of Protestantism. It took shape in the
eventful years between 1520 and 1570.

[Sidenote: Religious Opposition to the Roman Catholic Church in
England]

In order to understand how this religious and ecclesiastical revolution
was effected in England, we must appreciate the various elements
distrustful of the Catholic Church in that country about the year 1525.
In the first place, the Lutheran teachings were infiltrating into the
country. As early as 1521 a small group at Cambridge had become
interested in the new German theology, and thence the sect spread to
Oxford, London, and other intellectual centers. It found its early
converts chiefly among the lower clergy and the merchants of the large
towns, but for several years it was not numerous.

In the second place, there was the same feeling in England as we have
already noted throughout all Europe that the clergy needed reform in
morals and in manners. This view was shared not only by the
comparatively insignificant group of heretical Lutherans, but likewise
by a large proportion of the leading men who accounted themselves
orthodox members of the Catholic Church. The well-educated humanists
were especially eloquent in preaching reform. The writings of Erasmus
had great vogue in England. John Colet (1467?-1519), a famous dean of
St. Paul's cathedral in London, was a keen reformer who disapproved of
auricular confession and of the celibacy of the clergy. Sir Thomas More
(1478-1535), one of the greatest minds of the century, thought the
monks were lazy and indolent, and the whole body of churchmen in need
of an intellectual betterment. But neither Colet nor More had any
intention of breaking away from the Roman Church. To them, and to many
like them, reform could be secured best within the traditional
ecclesiastical body.

[Sidenote: Political Opposition to the Roman Catholic Church in
England]

A third source of distrust of the Church was a purely political feeling
against the papacy. As we have already seen, the English king and
English parliament on several earlier occasions had sought to restrict
the temporal and political jurisdiction of the pope in England, but
each restriction had been imposed for political reasons and even then
had represented the will of the monarch rather than that of the nation.
In fact, the most striking limitations of the pope's political
jurisdiction in the kingdom had been enacted during the early stages of
the Hundred Years' War, when the papacy was under French influence, and
had served, therefore, indirectly as political weapons against the
French king. Before that war was over, the operation of the statutes
had been relaxed, and for a century or more prior to 1525 little was
heard of even a political feeling against the bishop of Rome.

Nevertheless an evolution in English government was in progress at that
very time, which was bound sooner or later to create friction with the
Holy See. On one hand, a sense of nationalism and of patriotism had
been steadily growing in England, and it was at variance with the older
cosmopolitan idea of Catholicism. On the other hand, a great increase
of royal power had appeared in the fifteenth century, notably after the
accession of the Tudor family in 1485. Henry VII (1485-1509) had
subordinated to the crown both the nobility and the parliament, and the
patriotic support of the middle class he had secured. And when his son,
Henry VIII (1509-1547), came to the throne, the only serious obstacle
which appeared to be left in the way of royal absolutism was the
privileged independence of the Catholic Church.

[Sidenote: Early Loyalty of Henry VIII to the Roman Catholic Church]

Yet a number of years passed before Henry VIII laid violent hands upon
the Church. In the meanwhile, he proved himself a devoted Roman
Catholic. He scented the new Lutheran heresy and sought speedily to
exterminate it. He even wrote in 1521 with his own royal pen a bitter
arraignment of the new theology, and sent his book, which he called
_The Defence of the Seven Sacraments_, with a delightful
dedicatory epistle to the pope. For his prompt piety and filial
orthodoxy, he received from the bishop of Rome the proud title of
_Fidei Defensor_, or Defender of the Faith, a title which he
jealously bore until his death, and which his successors, the
sovereigns of Great Britain, with like humor have continued to bear
ever since. He seemed not even to question the pope's political claims.
He allied himself on several occasions with Leo X in the great game of
European politics. His chief minister and adviser in England for many
years was Thomas Wolsey, the most conspicuous ecclesiastic in his
kingdom and a cardinal of the Roman Church.

[Sidenote: The Marriage Difficulty of Henry VIII]

Under these circumstances it is difficult to see how the Anglican
Church would have immediately broken away from Catholic unity had it
not been for the peculiar marital troubles of Henry VIII. The king had
been married eighteen years to Catherine of Aragon, and had been
presented by her with six children (of whom only one daughter, the
Princess Mary, had survived), when one day he informed her that they
had been living all those years in mortal sin and that their union was
not true marriage. The queen could hardly be expected to agree with
such a definition, and there ensued a legal suit between the royal
pair.

To Henry VIII the matter was really quite simple. Henry was tired of
Catherine and wanted to get rid of her; he believed the queen could
bear him no more children and yet he ardently desired a male heir;
rumor reported that the susceptible king had recently been smitten by
the brilliant black eyes of a certain Anne Boleyn, a maid-in-waiting at
the court. The purpose of Henry was obvious; so was the means, he
thought. For it had occurred to him that Catherine was his elder
brother's widow, and, therefore, had no right, by church law, to marry
him. To be sure, a papal dispensation had been obtained from Pope
Julius II authorizing the marriage, but why not now obtain a revocation
of that dispensation from the reigning Pope Clement VII? Thus the
marriage with Catherine could be declared null and void, and Henry
would be a bachelor, thirty-six years of age, free to wed some
princess, or haply Anne Boleyn.

[Sidenote: Difficult Position of the Pope]

There was no doubt that Clement VII would like to do a favor for his
great English champion, but two difficulties at once presented
themselves. It would be a most dangerous precedent for the pope to
reverse the decision of one of his predecessors. Worse still, the
Emperor Charles V, the nephew of Queen Catherine, took up cudgels in
his aunt's behalf and threatened Clement with dire penalties if he
nullified the marriage. The pope complained truthfully that he was
between the anvil and the hammer. There was little for him to do except
to temporize and to delay decision as long as possible.

The protracted delay was very irritating to the impulsive English king,
who was now really in love with Anne Boleyn. Gradually Henry's former
effusive loyalty to the Roman See gave way to a settled conviction of
the tyranny of the papal power, and there rushed to his mind the
recollection of efforts of earlier English rulers to restrict that
power. A few salutary enactments against the Church might compel a
favorable decision from the pope.

Henry VIII seriously opened his campaign against the Roman Church in
1531, when he frightened the English clergy into paying a fine of over
half a million dollars for violating an obsolete statute that had
forbidden reception of papal legates without royal sanction, and in the
same year he forced the clergy to recognize himself as supreme head of
the Church "as far as that is permitted by the law of Christ." His
subservient Parliament then empowered him to stop the payment of
annates and to appoint the bishops without recourse to the papacy.
Without waiting longer for the papal decision, he had Cranmer, one of
his own creatures, whom he had just named archbishop of Canterbury,
declare his marriage with Catherine null and void and his union with
Anne Boleyn canonical and legal. Pope Clement VII thereupon handed down
his long-delayed decision favorable to Queen Catherine, and
excommunicated Henry VIII for adultery.

[Sidenote: Separation of England from the Roman Catholic Church: the
Act of Supremacy]

The formal breach between England and Rome occurred in 1534. Parliament
passed a series of laws, one of which declared the king to be the "only
supreme head in earth of the Church of England," and others cut off all
communication with the pope and inflicted the penalty of treason upon
any one who should deny the king's ecclesiastical supremacy.

One step in the transition of the Church of England had now been taken.
For centuries its members had recognized the pope as their
ecclesiastical head; henceforth they were to own the ecclesiastical
headship of their king. From the former Catholic standpoint, this might
be schism but it was not necessarily heresy. Yet Henry VIII encountered
considerable opposition from the higher clergy, from the monks, and
from many intellectual leaders, as well as from large numbers of the
lower classes. A popular uprising--the Pilgrimage of Grace--was sternly
suppressed, and such men as the brilliant Sir Thomas More and John
Fisher, the aged and saintly bishop of Rochester, were beheaded because
they retained their former belief in papal supremacy. Tudor despotism
triumphed.

[Sidenote: The "Six Articles"]

The breach with Rome naturally encouraged the Lutherans and other
heretics to think that England was on the point of becoming Protestant,
but nothing was further from the king's mind. The assailant of Luther
remained at least partially consistent. And the Six Articles (1539)
reaffirmed the chief points in Catholic doctrine and practice and
visited dissenters with horrible punishment. While separating England
from the papacy, Henry was firmly resolved to maintain every other
tenet of the Catholic faith as he had received it. His middle-of-the-
road policy was enforced with much bloodshed. On one side, the Catholic
who denied the royal supremacy was beheaded; on the other, the
Protestant who denied transubstantiation was burned! It has been
estimated that during the reign of Henry VIII the number of capital
condemnations for politico-religious offenses ran into the thousands--
an inquisition that in terror and bloodshed is comparable to that of
Spain.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the Monasteries]

It was likewise during the reign of Henry VIII that one of the most
important of all earlier Christian institutions--monasticism--came to
an end in England. There were certainly grave abuses and scandals in
some of the monasteries which dotted the country, and a good deal of
popular sentiment had been aroused against the institution. Then, too
the monks had generally opposed the royal pretensions to religious
control and remained loyal to the pope. But the deciding factor in the
suppression of the monasteries was undoubtedly economic. Henry, always
in need of funds on account of his extravagances, appropriated part of
the confiscated property for the benefit of the crown, and the rest he
astutely distributed as gigantic bribes to the upper classes of the
laity. The nobles who accepted the ecclesiastical wealth were thereby
committed to the new anti-papal religious settlement in England.

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