Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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СКАЧАТЬ a matter of principle as well as of self-preservation. The Church’s hierarchy, Luther insisted, was illegitimate. It dominated and exploited when it should, Christlike, serve and submit. Priests, bishops, and popes should be mere functionaries, chosen by the Christian community to provide them with religious services. But then who should govern the Church? The Anabaptists’ spiritual anarchy was not to Luther’s taste. Long-standing Christian tradition taught that secular rulers, from the Holy Roman Emperor down, had been granted their authority by God. The New Testament taught that Christians should obey such secular rulers as a matter of conscience. What’s more, Europe’s rulers were all baptized Christians, and Luther argued that all baptized Christians were the spiritual equal of any pope. Surely, because God has given princes power over secular matters, it would be natural for them to assume responsibility for religious affairs too.¹

      In 1520, Luther appealed to Germany’s princes to take religious reform into their own hands. They did not do so – yet. Most preferred to wait and see what would happen, although some encouraged reformist preaching in their territories. Even after the disaster of the Peasants’ War, there was no agreement as to what should actually be done. Worse, a terrifying Turkish invasion, which conquered most of Hungary in 1526 and would reach the walls of Vienna in 1529, meant that this was no time for intra-Christian quarrels. So when the princes of the Holy Roman Empire gathered at the Diet of Speyer in 1526, they unanimously agreed to postpone the problem. Until a proper council of the Church (a much-hoped-for mirage) could resolve the religious questions, each prince should “so live, govern and carry himself” in his religious policy “as he hopes and trusts to answer to God and his Imperial Majesty”.² Almost by accident, this anodyne resolution created space for something that had never happened before. One by one, territories and cities began to peel away from the universal Church. In the lead was Luther’s own Saxony. Luther published a German order of service for Saxony in 1526, and the new church structure that coalesced there was widely imitated.

      The breathing space created at Speyer was brief, but it was enough. In 1529, another Diet of Speyer overwhelmingly passed a resolution rescinding the implicit permissions granted three years earlier, horrified at how they had been used. Overwhelmingly but, this time, not unanimously. Five princes made a formal “Protestation” against the new decree. They, their allies, and their spiritual descendants down to the present became known as Protestants.

      Between them, those first Protestants encapsulate the tensions of political Reformation. There is no doubting the real religious conviction behind their stand. Elector Frederick of Saxony, who had protected Luther but never been persuaded by him, had died in 1525. His brother and successor, John, was a true believer. So was George, from 1527 the margrave of Brandenburg, who had been converted by Luther’s courage at the Diet of Worms. Philip, landgrave of Hesse, had also met Luther at Worms, when he was only sixteen. By 1525, when he had commanded the troops who massacred the peasants at Frankenhausen, he was fully in the reformers’ camp. All of these men knew the risk they were taking. Three days after the Protestation, Saxony, Hesse, and three leading Protestant cities – Strassburg, Nuremberg and Ulm – signed a secret defensive pact.³

      The risk the princes were taking was matched by the potential rewards. They had already begun to assume full control of the churches in their territories. Even during the Peasants’ War itself, Philip of Hesse was drawing up an inventory of the property owned by monasteries in his lands. After all, Luther’s theology made monasteries redundant and emphasized the rights of secular princes. Surely those hard-pressed and impoverished princes should be able to take over the monasteries’ ill-gotten wealth, to use in God’s service as they saw fit? Once the example was set, it proved too tempting to resist. There was safety in numbers. Each territory that jumped made it easier for the next one. It turned out that the Germans’ modest and conscientious reforms were only a starting point for more rapacious regimes to come.

      Outside the Holy Roman Empire, political Reformations first took root in two sets of territories that were in effect safe from outside interference: the ferociously independent cantons of Switzerland, and the lands around the Baltic Sea. We will return to Switzerland’s distinctive, republican Reformations in the next chapter. The Baltic story was, at first, simply an extension of Germany’s. The grand master of the Teutonic Knights, a religious-military order that controlled territories in what is now Poland, was advised by Luther in 1523 that he could abandon his celibacy and turn his lands into a secular principality. He liked the prospect, and so in 1525 made himself duke of Prussia and his subjects into Lutherans. The wife he chose came from another northern early-adopter territory: the powerful kingdom of Denmark, which extended south into Germany and included modern Norway, and by the 1530s was caught in a civil war between two claimants to the throne. One of them allied himself with the reformers, and when he emerged as King Christian III in 1536, he led his whole kingdom out of the Catholic Church. For the next century, Denmark would remain the single most substantial Lutheran state.

      Sweden’s case was more idiosyncratic. After more than a century under Danish rule, Sweden had broken free in the early 1520s. The rebel leader turned king, Gustav Vasa, had no intention of ceding an inch of his new sovereignty to anyone. So when German merchants in his ports began buzzing with tales of princes to the south sloughing off papal authority, his interest was piqued. The Reformation that he slowly imposed on a reluctant Sweden was clearly influenced by Luther and implemented by churchmen and ministers who were true Lutheran believers, but it was Gustav Vasa’s Reformation, not Luther’s. Its distinctive features were his seizure of huge amounts of church property and his iron insistence that the Swedish church’s hierarchy and courts be under royal control.

      Even Gustav Vasa, however, looks tame compared with the Reformation era’s most megalomaniacal opportunist. Henry VIII was not a natural Lutheran. His greatest talent was political display, an invaluable skill for the ruler of a kingdom whose fading grandeur was not matched by much real power. His piety was as theatrical as the rest of his persona – which is not to doubt its sincerity: no better way to persuade others than to persuade yourself first. So when Luther’s movement erupted, Henry threw himself into the fray with characteristic panache.

      Like the Renaissance scholar he fancied himself to be, Henry wrote a book. Despite his ghostwriters’ efforts, I Assert That There Are Seven Sacraments is no great piece of theology; but celebrity sells, and it became one of the few anti-Luther pamphlets to be a commercial success in Germany. Whether anyone was persuaded by Henry’s argument, we may doubt. But in two quarters, at least, it struck home. For one, Luther could not ignore such a high-profile challenger. He wrote a vitriolic reply, much to the fury of the English king, who only liked polemical rough-and-tumble on his own terms. More important, however, Henry’s book found its mark in Rome. He had long resented the pope’s gift of glorious titles to the kings of Spain (“the Catholic King”) and France (“the Most Christian King”), while England was left out. Now, finally and after some negotiation, Henry got his prize and became “Defender of the Faith.”

      So Henry’s initial response to the Reformation was to remain ostentatiously Catholic and thereby to extort favours from Rome. Other Catholic kings were also discovering that the pope now needed them more than they needed him. But for Henry VIII, this turned out not to be enough. He ran up against one of the pope’s few undisputed powers: canon law, which included the law of marriage. In 1527, fretted by his lack of sons and entranced by a young noblewoman named Anne Boleyn, Henry convinced himself that his long-standing marriage to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon was invalid. Only the pope could grant the annulment Henry suddenly, desperately wanted. Yet Henry’s case in law was flimsy, and the pope was loath to offend Queen Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V. Henry tried every diplomatic trick in the book, but Rome would not cooperate.

      In another generation, that drama would have resolved itself some other way. But the precedent set by the German princes, and the arguments made by some opportunistic English readers of Luther, raised an enticing possibility. What if the pope did not, in fact, have the right to judge an English king’s marriage? What if God intended that the king himself should be head of the church in his СКАЧАТЬ