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

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Dutch persecution. The tale of Dirk Willemsz became iconic. Willemsz escaped from a Catholic prison in the spring of 1569 and fled across a frozen river. He crossed safely, but the ice gave way under the officer who was following him. Willemsz turned back and saved the man’s life by pulling him from the water. As a result, he was rearrested and, eventually, executed. In legal terms, this rigour made sense: he was still an unrepentant heretic. But such stories did not give the law a good name.

      The Dutch Republic was content to tolerate Mennonites. Their closed communities were antisocial but not openly subversive. They had scruples about matters like swearing oaths and bearing arms, which took a little goodwill to accommodate politically, but the goodwill was there, greased by the Mennonites’ willingness to pay hefty extra taxes to regularize their status.

      The Mennonites’ heroic virtues did not, however, extend to toleration. In the 1550s, they themselves divided bitterly, and by the end of the century there were at least six distinct, mutually reviling Mennonite groups in the Netherlands. The most divisive issue, with painful irony, was how far they ought to tolerate one another. One party, the Waterlanders, rejected the practice of formally excluding or “shunning” those who fell foul of the godly community’s discipline. For this they were duly shunned by the others. They persisted in preaching reunion, and in the 1630s several Mennonite groups drew on Waterlander principles to form a body, the United Congregations, that decided to tolerate differences over minor issues in the faith. Unfortunately, it was unclear what counted as a minor issue. The Waterlanders themselves, who disliked binding rules of any kind, were not actually permitted to join the United Congregations, but by this time the Waterlanders had divisions of their own. In the 1620s, an educated, dissident movement of freethinkers known as the Collegiants had emerged, rejecting all hierarchies and structures and permitting any participant in their informal meetings to speak. The Waterlanders expelled them. The Collegiants themselves, in turn, expelled those who questioned Christ’s divinity. The United Congregations then split over how to deal with the Collegiants. The faction who argued that Collegiants, anti-Trinitarians, and even the unbaptized should be admitted to the Eucharist were eventually expelled in 1664 and sought refuge among the Waterlanders. Naturally, the Waterlanders refused to admit such dangerous spiritual anarchists.²¹

      This farce contains the paradoxes of Protestant tolerance and intolerance in microcosm. It shows Protestants’ endless appetite for squabbling and their widespread conviction that separated brethren remained brethren. It also shows that the most divisive issue of all was tolerance itself. Even so, unwillingly, whether from political positioning, commercial opportunism, the exhaustion of alternatives, or even a degree of principle, Protestantism was by the late seventeenth century slouching toward a grudging, genuine tolerance.

The Devil’s Minions

      No more than a few thousand religious dissidents were judicially killed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but between 1450 and 1700, and especially between 1550 and 1650, some fifty thousand to a hundred thousand Europeans were put to death for a slightly different religious crime: witchcraft. Around 80 per cent of these were women, whereas roughly 80 per cent of executed heretics were men. The numbers are not vast; more people than that died of the plague in London in one year, 1665. But the slaughter of tens of thousands of women for an imaginary crime is a phenomenon worth noticing.

      For centuries, most Europeans had believed in witches: malevolent misfits who used uncanny powers to inflict harm on their neighbours. It was only from the fifteenth century on, however, that witches began to be judicially prosecuted in large numbers. Many jurisdictions now began treating witchcraft as a species of heresy, accusing supposed witches of making pacts with the devil. Petty crimes of personal malice were redefined in apocalyptic terms.

      What, if anything, did this have to do with the Reformation? The witch hunts and the wars of religion took place in the same region, in the same period, and invoked the same murderous logic. Yet the two phenomena do not line up neatly, either chronologically or denominationally. Catholics killed more witches than Protestants did, but some Protestant witch-hunters worked very hard to stay competitive, and some Catholic territories, such as Spain, prosecuted very few witches. Protestants and Catholics read each other’s anti-witchcraft treatises and competed to prove their zeal.

      One key connection, however, has been made by the work of the historian Gary K. Waite. Witches were not alone in attracting both Catholic and Protestant persecutors; so did Anabaptists, who were often described as devilish, for their doctrines, their behaviour, and their infuriating steadfastness under torture. One group of southern German Anabaptists, arrested in 1532, sang, laughed, barked, and brayed so that it sounded as if “the prison was full of devils”. Or again, in February 1535, during the height of the Münster crisis, a group of Anabaptists (seven men, four women) burned their clothes in an upper room in Amsterdam and ran out naked into the street, proclaiming woe and claiming to be preaching “the naked truth”. When forcibly dressed after their arrest, they tore their clothes from their bodies. Clothes had first been donned by Adam and Eve as a sign of sin, to conceal their shame. By shedding their clothes, the Amsterdam nudists proclaimed that they had overcome sin. At the same time, their nudity symbolically revealed and denounced the corruption that their godless neighbours had concealed under their fine clothing. To those appalled neighbours, this looked demonic. The Amsterdam nudists were discharged, but Anabaptists, sexual deviants, and demons were mixing together in people’s minds. Two years later, a Dutch Anabaptist was burned as a witch. In the records, her crime was initially given as adult baptism, but that was scratched out and replaced with witchcraft.²²

      The leap from anti-Anabaptist paranoia to witch panic was easy. Anabaptists’ secrecy seemed diabolical; David Joris’s success in hiding among honest Christians was blamed on sorcery. Joris had in fact taught that there was no devil, but because the standard judicial view was that only witches deny the devil’s existence, this hardly helped. Some radicals also questioned conventional sexual mores, even beyond nudity or permitting women to teach. One Thuringian sect, the Bloodfriends, supposedly taught total sexual freedom for the saved. Their secret outdoor meetings were said to end with the command “be fruitful and multiply”, whereupon they paired off. Such deliciously appalling tales were widely told. One French gentleman, arrested in 1562 for attending a secret Protestant meeting, shamefacedly explained that he had gone along because he had hoped, vainly, that the rumours of orgies were true. The judges dismissed his case, our witness tells us, “trying not to laugh”. Not everyone thought it was funny. A sectarian orgy is not too different from a witches’ sabbath.²³

      Worst of all was the Anabaptists’ refusal to baptize infants and their insistence that converts who had been baptized as infants be rebaptized. Catholic and Lutheran baptisms included a formal exorcism, casting the devil out of a child born in original sin. Anabaptism could be construed as a demonic scheme to fill the world with unbaptized slaves of the devil. Everyone knew that witches’ sabbaths involved sacrificing, and indeed eating, unbaptized babies. Suspicion came to focus on midwives, who were suspected both of concealing Anabaptists’ babies so as to avoid baptism and also of witchcraft, especially when babies died suddenly. Adult baptisms only made matters worse, because the sabbath legend also held that the devil forced witches to renounce Christian baptism and to accept a foully diabolical baptism, with new devil-parents instead of godparents (see plate).

      By the 1550s, the categories of “witch” and “Anabaptist” were becoming blurred. In the Lutheran territory of Baden, church authorities asked each parish in 1556 whether they were troubled by “Anabaptists, sorcerers, necromancers, or similar people”. In Wiesensteig, in southwestern Germany, a secret Anabaptist group was discovered meeting by night in the summer of 1562. Weeks later, a freak summer hailstorm did terrible damage to crops in the area, and twenty women were arrested as witches, accused both of causing the storm and of having robbed children of their baptism. They were burned en masse, and at least forty more executions followed over the next few months. This was СКАЧАТЬ