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

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СКАЧАТЬ for religious hatred. To read it was to learn that Catholics always and forever seek Protestants’ blood, and that their hatred may sleep but never dies.⁷

      This was an exaggeration but not a fantasy. Catholics did not thirst for Protestant blood, but many did dream of wiping Protestantism out. But just because someone is out to get you does not mean you are not paranoid. The popularity of martyr stories shows how much Protestants saw the world in apocalyptic terms. Even those who lived in peaceful times under securely Protestant rule were ready to understand their lives as dramas of persecution, whether the villains were domestic political opponents, godless neighbours, or the devil himself. It was an alluring, all-consuming view of the world. The daily struggle of human life was a drama written by God’s hand, in which the struggle itself was the surest guarantee of victory.

Turning the Tide

      Protestants were formidably difficult to suppress. They were impervious to quiet reasonableness and only drew strength from persecution. By the mid-sixteenth century, however, Catholic powers were developing two other ways of tackling the problem, two techniques that between them kept Protestantism on the defensive for nearly two hundred years. Whereas in the 1560s it was reasonable to fear, or hope, that Protestantism would soon sweep all before it, instead it found itself contained and driven back across Europe.

      The most effective engine of this Catholic fightback was the epochal reform programme sometimes called the Counter-Reformation. Between 1545 and 1563, a great council of the Catholic Church met intermittently at Trent in northern Italy. It decisively rejected Protestant doctrines and laid out an ambitious vision for disciplinary reform and educational renewal of the Church, which was implemented with verve by a reinvigorated papacy and by a series of religious orders. Over the next century, a more disciplined, better-educated Catholicism took shape, depriving the Protestants of some of their best talking points. Many Protestants believed that the Council of Trent had hatched a fiendish plot to slaughter Protestants. The truth was worse: it had hatched a plot to breathe new life into Catholicism, and Protestants struggled to respond.⁸

      The other engine of Catholic revival was war. It began in France. By the 1550s, French Protestants, hardened by twenty years of intermittent persecution, were being fortified and organized by missionaries sent from Calvin’s Geneva. The movement was on the march. High-profile converts were being won, and in 1559 the French Reformed Church even had the audacity to hold a secret national synod in Paris. In that same year, King Henry II, hammer of heretics, was killed in a gruesome jousting accident. Protestants naturally saw this as divine vengeance. In the political turmoil that followed, one party, led by the noble family of Guise, was staunchly Catholic, while the other, led by the king’s widow, Catherine de’ Medici, was still Catholic but willing to buy the Protestants’ support in the currency of toleration. By the end of 1560, official persecution had largely ceased.

      It was a moment of heady religious anarchy. France’s Calvinist churches surged into the open. Street sermons attracted vast crowds, singing psalms to the plain metrical tunes that were becoming their battle hymns. By early 1562, something close to a tenth of the entire French population, and nearly half of the nobility, were affiliated with Calvinist churches. Not since Germany in the early 1520s had there been such an episode of breakneck Protestant expansion. A Protestant France suddenly seemed not only possible but inevitable.⁹

      In Germany in the 1520s, however, the Catholic establishment had been bewildered and paralysed. Forty years later, its French counterparts fought back. Catholic preachers and polemicists matched the Protestants book for book and insult for insult. When official persecution ceased, vigilantism took over. As tinder-dry resentment and hatred piled up, eventually, inevitably, a spark caught. It happened on 1 March 1562, in the north-eastern town of Vassy. The duke of Guise, leader of the Catholic hard-liners, stopped there to attend Mass. A large Calvinist congregation was assembled illegally in a converted barn nearby, and the duke’s men tried to break up the meeting. A scuffle broke out. Someone threw a stone at the duke. He ordered the barn to be sealed and burned to the ground. Dozens of Calvinists were killed.

      So began a series of civil wars that would last, on and off, for thirty-five years. The Protestant nobility mobilized for self-defence and to defeat the Guise faction. The Guise aimed, more simply, to exterminate French Protestantism. Two successive kings, Charles IX and Henry III, were caught in the middle: Catholic, but hoping for compromise of some sort. Repeatedly, they declared pacifications granting restricted but real rights to the Protestant minority. Repeatedly, the kingdom collapsed into violence again.

      The Protestants fought tenaciously and in the end secured a passably honourable stalemate that won them protected status for most of a century. The spring of 1562 was, however, French Protestantism’s high-water mark. Once the fighting had begun, the conversions stopped, and the Protestants were on the defensive, in the streets as well as on the battlefield. Violence kills people but also divides them. Once blood has been spilled, it is very hard to remain neutral or persuadable. During the first religious war of 1562–63, virtually all French Christians became entrenched in one of the two religious parties, and thereafter viewed each other as enemies.

      The violence ran both ways. Protestants took over several towns, sometimes slaughtering the Catholic leadership and often targeting Catholic priests and defiling Catholic churches. They mutilated the saints’ statues, which they believed to be blasphemous idols. Female saints’ statues were liable to have their noses cut off, as if they were syphilitic whores. But most popular violence was driven by the Catholic majority, urged by their preachers to purify communities polluted by heretics living in their midst. Paris became a cauldron of anti-Protestant hatred.¹⁰

      In 1572, it boiled over. Yet another royal peace plan was being tried. But when the Protestant grandees gathered in Paris and their military leader was wounded by an anonymous sniper, tensions boiled up immediately. With both sides suspecting treachery and plotting pre-emptive strikes, the king decided he could no longer remain above the fray. Instead, he tried to eliminate the Protestant leadership at a stroke. Before dawn on Sunday, 24 August 1572, St Bartholomew’s Day, royal soldiers murdered the wounded man and several other Protestant dignitaries in their beds. It was intended as a surgical strike, but the people of Paris could read the signals. Crying, “The king wills it”, Catholic mobs set out on an unprecedented orgy of destruction. In three days, some three thousand Protestants were killed, along with any Catholics who defended them. Over the following month, this massacre was echoed in a dozen French cities with histories of bitter interreligious tension; perhaps a further six thousand died.¹¹

      The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was the defining moment of the French religious wars. It was not exactly premeditated, but nor did the perpetrators try to disown it. Pope Gregory XIII struck a medal in celebration of the massacre and commissioned commemorative frescoes. And not without reason: the massacre achieved something that individual trials and executions could not. It broke the bravado of Protestantism’s martyr complex. The scale and speed of the killing dazed Protestants, who now questioned whether God was really on their side. Rumours spoke of fifty thousand, a hundred thousand dead. “The whole of France”, wrote Geneva’s city council, “is bathed in the blood of innocent people and covered with dead bodies.” While in truth the numbers of the dead were only a tiny proportion of France’s Protestants, the massacre virtually eliminated Protestantism from large areas of the country. In Rouen, for every Protestant who was killed, ten converted to Catholicism. Catholic Europe had finally discovered how to scare Protestants into conformity.¹²

      Those who survived and stood their ground felt that every paranoid suspicion of Catholic treachery had been justified. Calvin’s successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, saw the massacre as proof of a “universal conspiracy”. French Protestants dug into their strongholds in southern and western France, and the religious wars resumed with fresh bitterness. They wore on until the mid-1590s, when a new king, Henry IV – a Protestant who converted to Catholicism in order to СКАЧАТЬ