History of the Reformation. Thomas M. Lindsay

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СКАЧАТЬ should be part of the proceedings. All that was public property. The imperial summons and safe conduct had not treated him as a condemned heretic.212 He had been addressed in it as Ehrsamer, lieber, andächtiger—terms which would not have been used to a heretic, and which were ostentatiously omitted from the safe conduct sent him by Duke George of Saxony.213 He knew also that the Emperor had nevertheless published an edict ordering the civil authorities to seize his books, and to prevent more from being printed, published, or sold, and that such an edict threw doubts upon the value of the safe conduct.214 But he probably did not know that this edict was a third draft issued by the Emperor without consulting the Diet. Nor is it likely that he knew how Aleander had been working day and night to prevent his appearance at the Diet from being more than a mere formality, nor how far the nuncio had prevailed with the Emperor and with his councillors. His friends could tell him all this—though even they were not aware until next morning how resolved the Emperor was that Luther should not be permitted to make a speech.215 They knew enough, however, to be able to impress on Luther that he must restrain himself, and act in such a way as to force the hands of his opponents, and gain permission to speak at length in a second audience. The Estates wished to hear him if the Emperor and his entourage had resolved to prevent him from speaking. These consultations probably settled the tactics which Luther followed on his first appearance before the Diet.216

      Next morning (Wednesday, April 17th), Ulrich von Pappenheim, the marshal of ceremonies, came to Luther's room before ten o'clock, and, greeting him courteously and with all respect, informed him that he was to appear before the Emperor and the Diet that day at four o'clock, when he would be informed why he had been summoned.217 Immediately after the marshal had left, there came an urgent summons from a Saxon noble, Hans von Minkwitz, who was dying in his lodgings, that Luther would come to hear his confession and administer the sacrament to him. Luther instantly went to soothe and comfort the dying man, notwithstanding his own troubles.218 We have no information how the hours between twelve and four were spent. It is almost certain that there must have been another consultation. Spalatin and Brück had discovered that the conduct of the audience was not to be in the hands of Glapion, the confessor of the Emperor, as they had up to that time supposed, but in those of John Eck, the Orator or Official of the Archbishop of Trier.219 This looked badly for Luther. Eck had been officiously busy in burning Luther's books at Trier; he lodged in the same house and in the room next to the papal nuncio.220 Aleander, indeed, boasts that Eck was entirely devoted to him, and that he had been able to draft the question which Eck put to Luther during the first audience.221

§ 5. Luther's first Appearance before the Diet of Worms.222

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      A little before four o'clock, the marshal and Caspar Sturm, the herald, came to Luther's lodging to escort him to the audience hall. They led the Reformer into the street to conduct him to the Bishop's Palace, where the Emperor was living along with his younger brother Ferdinand, afterwards King of the Romans and Emperor, and where the Diet met.223 The streets were thronged; faces looked down from every window; men and women had crowded the roofs to catch a glimpse of Luther as he passed. It was difficult to force a way through the crowd, and, besides, Sturm, who was responsible for Luther's safety, feared that some Spaniard might deal the Reformer a blow with a dagger in the crowd. So the three turned into the court of the Swan Hotel; from it they got into the garden of the House of the Knights of St. John; and, as most of the courts and gardens of the houses communicated with each other, they were able to get into the court of the Bishop's Palace without again appearing on the street.224

      The court of the Palace was full of people eager to see Luther, most of them evidently friendly. It was here that old General Frundsberg, the most illustrious soldier in Germany, who was to be the conqueror in the famous fight at Pavia, clapped Luther kindly on the shoulder, and said words which have been variously reported. “My poor monk! my little monk! thou art on thy way to make a stand as I and many of my knights have never done in our toughest battles. If thou art sure of the justice of thy cause, then forward in the name of God, and be of good courage: God will not forsake thee.” From out the crowd, “here and there and from every corner, came voices saying, ‘Play the man! Fear not death; it can but slay the body: there is a life beyond.’ ”225 They went up the stair and entered the audience hall, which was crammed. While the marshal and the herald forced a way for Luther, he passed an old acquaintance, the deputy from Augsburg. “Ah, Doctor Peutinger,” said Luther, “are you here too?”226 Then he was led to where he was to stand before the Emperor; and these two lifelong opponents saw each other for the first time. “The fool entered smiling,” says Aleander (perhaps the lingering of the smile with which he had just greeted Dr. Peutinger): “he looked slowly round, and his face sobered.” “When he faced the Emperor,” Aleander goes on to say, “he could not hold his head still, but moved it up and down and from side to side.”227 All eyes were fixed on Luther, and many an account was written describing his appearance. “A man of middle height,” says an unsigned Spanish paper preserved in the British Museum, “with a strong face, a sturdy build of body, with eyes that scintillated and were never still. He was clad in the robe of the Augustinian Order, but with a belt of hide, with a large tonsure, newly shaven, and a coronal of short thick hair.”228 All noticed his gleaming eyes; and it was remarked that when his glance fell on an Italian, the man moved uneasily in his seat, as if “the evil eye was upon him.” Meanwhile, in the seconds before the silence was broken, Luther was making his observations. He noticed the swarthy Jewish-looking face of Aleander, with its gleam of hateful triumph. “So the Jews must have looked at Christ,” he thought.229 He saw the young Emperor, and near him the papal nuncios and the great ecclesiastics of the Empire. A wave of pity passed through him as he looked. “He seemed to me,” he said, “like some poor lamb among swine and hounds.”230 There was a table or bench with some books upon it. When Luther's glance fell on them, he saw that they were his own writings, and could not help wondering how they had got there.231 He did not know that Aleander had been collecting them for some weeks, and that, at command of the Emperor, he had handed them over to John Eck, the Official of Trier, for the purposes of the audience.232 Jerome Schurf made his way to Luther's side, and stood ready to assist in legal difficulties.

      The past and the future faced each other—the young Emperor in his rich robes of State, with his pale, vacant-looking face, but “carrying more at the back of his head than his countenance showed,” the descendant of long lines of kings, determined to maintain the beliefs, rites, and rules of that Mediæval Church which his ancestors had upheld; and the monk, with his wan face seamed with the traces of spiritual conflict and victory, in the poor dress of his Order, a peasant's son, resolute to cleave a way for the new faith of evangelical freedom, the spiritual birthright of all men.

      The strained silence233 was broken by the Official of Trier, a man of lofty presence, saying, in a clear, ringing voice so that all could hear distinctly, first in Latin and then in German:

      “ ‘Martin Luther, His Imperial Majesty, Sacred and Victorious (sacra et invicta), on the advice of all the Estates of the Holy Roman Empire, has ordered you to be summoned here to the throne of His Majesty, in order that you may recant and recall, according to the force, form, and meaning of the citation-mandate decreed against you by His Majesty and communicated legally to you, the books, both in Latin and in German, published by you and spread abroad, along with their contents: Wherefore I, in the name of His Imperial Majesty and of the Princes of the Empire, ask you: First, Do you confess that these books exhibited in your presence (I show him a bundle of books written in Latin and in German) and now named one by one, which have been circulated with your name on the title-page, are yours, and do you acknowledge them to be yours? Secondly, Do you wish to retract and recall them and their contents, or do you mean to adhere to them and to reassert them?’ ”234

      The books were not named; so Jerome Schurf called out, “Let the titles be read.”235 Then the notary, Maximilian Siebenberger (called Transilvanus),236 stepped forward and, taking up the books one by one, read their titles and briefly described СКАЧАТЬ