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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ heel. The wars were ended by the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which granted clear but limited rights to worship, self-government, and self-defence to “the so-called reformed religion”. By then, the Protestant minority was half the size it had been in 1562. A lifetime later, in 1685, French Protestantism was once more outlawed altogether.

      France contained and rolled back Protestantism at the cost of three and a half decades of devastating civil war. The story would be repeated in the Netherlands, where in 1566 a sudden cessation of persecution let loose an upsurge of Protestant sympathy. Protestants called it the “Wonderyear”, but prematurely. A swift crackdown gave way to a grinding eighty-year war between the Dutch and their Spanish Catholic rulers, splitting the Netherlands into a Spanish-ruled Catholic south and an independent Protestant north: the origin of the divide between the modern kingdoms of Belgium and the Netherlands. Again, the violence was both vicious and effective. Antwerp, the Protestants’ former stronghold, was brutally sacked by a Spanish army in 1575. Protestants were all but driven out of the south.

      The last and most terrible of the religious wars was the Thirty Years War, which began in 1618 as an attempt by the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, to suppress a Protestant rebellion in Bohemia. A crushing victory there emboldened him to try to wipe out Protestantism throughout the empire. First Denmark, then Sweden, and finally France (for political rather than religious reasons) intervened against the Catholic onslaught and managed between them to beat it back. The eventual peace confirmed the empire’s religious pluralism and officially recognized Calvinism for the first time. But the Catholic victories that had been won at the start of the war were lasting. Protestantism was all but eliminated from large swathes of central Europe. The cost was unspeakable. Germany lost around a third of its entire population, from disease, famine, and the flight of refugees as well as battle deaths.

      None of these religious wars produced clear-cut victories. In each case, Catholic forces contained and rolled back Protestantism but failed to eradicate it. One result was that Protestants became convinced that Catholics were blood-soaked murderers who could only ever be fought, never persuaded or converted. Protestants’ ambitions were blunted even as their determination to survive grew more mulish. But the wars also raised more troubling questions about how they themselves dealt with religious dissent.

The Luxury of Intolerance

      From the time of Luther’s first clash with the “fanatics”, Protestants had to deal with the problem of error in their midst. For the emerging establishments, this was a war on two fronts. There were the radical dissidents who tended to be lumped together as “Anabaptists”, but there was also the larger problem of what Protestants should do about their neighbours who remained stubbornly Catholic. Between them, these two problems virtually destroyed the inherited concept of how to deal with heresy.

      For Protestants to treat Catholics as heretics might seem logical, but it was entirely impractical. There were simply too many of them, and moreover Protestant princes usually wanted to pacify rather than provoke their Catholic neighbours. Even Henry VIII, unmatched in his willingness to put Catholics to death, only once went so far as to burn a Catholic for heresy: an experiment he did not repeat.¹³ England’s Protestant rulers treated Catholics as political, not religious, offenders. By accepting the pope’s authority, so the argument ran, English Catholics were traitors, serving a foreigner instead of their own natural sovereign. This allowed English monarchs to restrict their anti-Catholic fury to their own subjects and slotted papal loyalists into a convenient preexisting legal category, treason. It also subjected English Catholics to a death at least as horrible as burning, and more humiliating: being hanged, drawn and quartered, an extended torture whose victims eventually died from being hacked to pieces from the belly out. Over two hundred English Catholics were killed this way in the sixteenth century, mostly under Elizabeth I. A few more were allowed a private beheading or deliberately starved to death in prison. Well over a thousand were killed in reprisals for failed rebellions.

      No other Protestant state treated Catholicism as a capital crime. Yet Catholics in Protestant countries remained vulnerable to discrimination of all kinds, were routinely forbidden to hold public office or to worship in public, and were subject to penal taxation. England’s official persecution wound down during the seventeenth century, but English anti-Catholic sentiment persisted. An entirely imaginary Catholic conspiracy to assassinate King Charles II triggered widespread panic and at least twenty-two executions between 1678 and 1681. A century later, an attempt to soften anti-Catholic legislation provoked the so-called Gordon Riots, a spasm of anti-Catholic violence across London that destroyed a great deal of Catholic property and left over three hundred people dead, most of them rioters killed by the army.

      Anabaptists and radicals seemed more straightforward. Every government loathed them, and there were few enough for traditional anti-heresy techniques to be applied. Some Protestant territories did so – the English, naturally, and also several Swiss cities. But others were more squeamish. Many were reluctant to invoke heresy as a legal category, preferring to dress up their persecution of radicals as self-defence. The idea that Anabaptists posed an existential threat to Protestant establishments may seem risible with hindsight, but early Protestants were primed to see diabolical threats on every side. Anabaptists were naked flames in societies whose sins were tinder dry. They needed to be doused before disaster ensued.

      Luther’s approach was to treat Anabaptists as blasphemers rather than as heretics. Blasphemy was a civil rather than a religious crime, which helped Luther evade the charge of hypocrisy for seeking freedom of conscience while prosecuting dissidents. Respectable religion was free; insulting God was not. Most jurisdictions continued to treat blasphemy as a capital crime throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. The English Quaker James Nayler was convicted of blasphemy for restaging Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the outskirts of Bristol in 1656, casting himself in the starring role and claiming that Christ was in him. One admirer wrote, “Thy name is no more to be called James but Jesus.” There was a clamour for his death, which the government only nominally resisted; he was in fact branded, whipped, bored through the tongue, and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. His health broken, he died less than a year after his release.¹⁴ The pretence that such prosecutions were not religious persecution was becoming hard to maintain. A Scottish student named Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for blasphemy in 1697, for ridiculing the Bible, calling Christ an impostor, and arguing that “God” was simply another word for nature. The punishment shocked his contemporaries. After him, Britain would execute no more blasphemers.

      The alternative was some form of religious toleration. The notion of toleration was a familiar one, but it did not have the idealistic feel that it has in our own age. Errors might be tolerable rather as a minor infestation of vermin is tolerable, because eradicating them would be difficult and costly. The classic argument for toleration was that only God can know believers’ hearts, and persecution produces hypocritical conformity rather than true belief. In other words, enforcing true belief is desirable but impossible. Against this pragmatism stood the principled case for persecution: truth cannot compromise with error, and giving simple Christians freedom to stray from the truth is as foolish as giving a child freedom to play with a razor.

      On the face of it, Luther’s defiance of the Church made it hard to justify any form of religious compulsion. In his early enthusiasm, Luther took that view explicitly. His doctrine of the two kingdoms stated that compulsion applied only to worldly matters. He denounced executions of Anabaptists, declaring that “we should allow everyone to believe what he wills”. But this was hardly a respectful pluralism. He added,

      Let them preach as confidently and boldly as they are able and against whomever they wish. For, as I have said, there must be sects, and the Word of God must be under arms and fight. . . . Let the spirits collide, and fight it out. If meanwhile some are led astray, all right, such is war.

      False believers did not need earthly chastisement, he insisted, because they would be punished in hell. Yes, it СКАЧАТЬ