Saint Ignatius Loyola
This Basque nobleman started as a soldier, and it was during his long agony as he recovered from a terrible wound received while defending Pamplona against the French – and two subsequent botched operations – that he discovered his inner spirituality and his need to serve Christ. His idea of service was based on supreme obedience.
Like so many of the outstanding figures of the sixteenth century, he was complex and contradictory. A tough man with an iron will, he was also highly sensitive and something of a mystic. He possessed a potent imagination. His celebrated Spiritual Exercises, still much used, rely above all on the intensive exercise of imagination.
Central to his teaching was the need for total obedience to the Church, the bride of Christ. The great order he founded, the Jesuits, were to be the shock troops of the huge fightback that is generally called the Counter-Reformation. Himself diamond-hard and ascetic, he nonetheless allowed the elite order he founded to be sinewy and subtle, to keep adjusting to the times.
Martin Luther
A stubborn man of peasant stock, and also a spiritual genius, Luther was very clever but had little subtlety and less sophistication. He was both the most influential evangelical and the most effective revolutionary in European history. A writer of superhuman productivity and a communicator of genius, he could not always control his pen. Some of what he wrote was vicious and vile. He was guilty of anti-Semitism, and at times he wrote savagely and violently in defence of the status quo. This makes his colossal contribution to the cause of change and the development of individual liberty all the more astounding. He could be boorish and foul-mouthed. He was excessively contentious and constantly divisive.
One of the multiple paradoxes of the sixteenth century was that this conservative man should have inspired momentous, continuing revolution; the movement he started in 1517 led to unimagined upheaval and the transfer of power and property on an enormous scale.
Although he resiled somewhat in his later years, the implication of his early teaching, with its supreme emphasis on faith and his notion of ‘the priesthood of all believers’, was that the Church was in effect redundant. All Christians were to be subject to each other, not some vast hierarchical structure. Supremely, he persuaded people to think for themselves. He ended the dark ages of the mind. He unleashed an enormous surge of popular education. He was arguably not just the greatest German, but also the greatest European.
Mary of Guise
Many people tried to rule Scotland, a turbulent and contrary nation, in the sixteenth century; Mary of Guise, a beautiful and charming French noblewoman, succeeded better than most. She was married to James V, King of Scots, from 1538 to 1542. A few years later, she came into her own. Unlike her ill-starred daughter Mary Queen of Scots, she showed sensitivity to the Scots and their affairs, and she steered a careful and skilful political course until the Scottish Reformation finally got under way. At this point, she started to panic and lost control.
She was a devout Catholic – but, unlike her namesake and contemporary in England, Mary Tudor, she did not make martyrs of Protestants. On the contrary, she actually allowed English Protestant refugees to find shelter and sanctuary in Scotland.
Mary Queen of Scots
Quite simply, the wrong queen at the wrong time. Bewitching and ardent, she sadly left the sophisticated French court; and, after a most difficult, stormy sea journey, she arrived in the bleak northern country she was to rule so disastrously – just when the weather was at its worst. John Knox, who was to harangue her with insolent but splendidly democratic confidence, noted with relish that the portents were bad from the very start.
At first, like her distinguished mother Mary of Guise, she managed to rule with some tact and sensitivity; but she simply could not understand that she had arrived in the midst of religious and social revolution.
Her taste in men was degraded; she indulged the frivolous Italian plotter David Rizzio, her so-called secretary, who was murdered by the loutish pals of her second husband, the bisexual wastrel Henry Darnley (by whom she produced the boy who was to become James VI and I). Then, when Darnley had been literally blown up (an atrocious crime in which she was surely complicit), she married the rapist, thug and sociopath Bothwell.
After unsuccessfully defying her own people, she threw herself on the mercy of Queen Elizabeth south of the Border, thus becoming history’s ultimate unwanted guest. Most of England wanted her dead, particularly when she stupidly and treacherously got involved in plots against her host; yet Elizabeth defied her advisers, and it was many years until she made the fateful decision.
And so, Mary was at last executed in a forlorn Northamptonshire castle. England rejoiced; bonfires were lit, bells rang across the land, and the celebrations continued for days. As for Elizabeth, she wept uncontrollably. Then she recovered and went on to preside over the defeat of the Spanish armada.
‘Bloody’ Mary Tudor, Queen of England
Mary has had a bad press, not least from Protestant propagandists infuriated by her enthusiastic burning of those whom she regarded as heretics. She is still known by the unkind but valid soubriquet of ‘Bloody Mary’. She executed nearly 300 Protestants, many of whom became celebrated martyrs. The policy was counter-productive, particularly because so many of those who were killed, including the leading churchmen Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Hooper, died so well and courageously. Although most of her subjects probably remained Catholics, Mary could not capitalise on this. Her controversial marriage to Philip II of Spain achieved little. Compared to her half-sister Elizabeth, who succeeded her, she was a poor monarch and indeed a total failure.
But she had a rotten life. She had seen her dignified mother, Catherine of Aragon, humiliated by her father, the brutish Henry VIII. She herself was declared a bastard. Her marriage to Philip was blighted by her inability to produce a child. As she was growing up, she showed a propensity to be fun-loving. She enjoyed gambling and adored fine clothes and jewellery. Slowly, grimly, dourness and duty took over.
Andrew Melville
A clever, cultured and cosmopolitan man from Angus, Melville played the part of Calvin to Knox’s Luther: he organised the second phase of the Scottish Reformation and gave it intellectual solidity. Like Knox, he was a democrat and was not afraid to harangue his monarch, in this case James VI. He outdid James in debate, and also insulted him, calling him ‘God’s silly vassal’. He eventually paid for his impudence when James had him imprisoned in London.
A brilliant intellectual, he accomplished much at Glasgow University, of which he was principal. He was a rigorous Presbyterian, and it was mainly thanks to him that Scotland became a firmly Presbyterian nation.
Pope Paul IV
The first and lesser of the two great Counter-Reformation Puritan popes, the Neapolitan Gian Pietro Caraffa at last became pope at the grand old age of 79. Personally fearless, he was a ferocious and tyrannical figure. He despised the Council of Trent, the great engine of Catholic reform. He preferred the Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books. He detested Spaniards almost as much as he hated Protestants. He held the Holy Roman Emperor in contempt.
He was probably slightly mad. But he succeeded in cleaning Rome up, driving out prostitutes and gangsters, bandits and beggars. In his severe personal asceticism, his refusal to compromise, and his resolute war on venality, corruption and softness, he could not have been more removed from the frivolous and decadent Renaissance popes whose disgraceful, self-indulgent antics had exacerbated the crisis in the old Church at the very time when pressure for reform was stirring.
Philip II of Spain
The son of Emperor Charles V, Philip II of Spain was a poor leader and constantly betrayed his avowed cause of Catholicism. Somehow he managed to bankrupt Spain, which should have been the wealthiest power in the world. He constantly failed, not just financially but also militarily. His most celebrated defeat was by the English, when