There were no outstanding female reformers – but, because queens were just as important as kings, women have a large part to play in our story. Queen Elizabeth of England was one of the greatest monarchs of all time, and it was she who very bravely and provocatively, at the beginning of her long reign, sent her army and navy north to Scotland to secure the Scottish Reformation. Unfortunately, Mary Queen of Scots did not understand, and could not cope with, the early Scottish Reformation. She is sometimes presented as a tragic figure, though that is not the verdict of this book. A genuinely tragic figure was Lady Jane Grey, very briefly queen of England, who has a minor and pitiful role in our story. Then there was Mary of Guise, the mother of Mary Queen of Scots, who was to rule Scotland with some skill and sensitivity, and who altogether showed a grasp of Scottish politics (and to some extent religion) that proved to be quite beyond her daughter.
In the short term, it has to be admitted that the Reformation was not necessarily good for Europe’s women. Places of refuge (and of partial freedom from male control), such as the cloister and the nunnery, were often destroyed. The clergy were allowed to marry, and many women who had been or would have been nuns became subject to male domination, which was not always benign. In some ways, women were liberated; in others, they became liable to potentially brutal domestic control, with no escape. A little later, there was to be wicked and sustained persecution of so-called witches, not least in Scotland, where King James VI lent his spurious intellectual imprimatur to the craze for witch-hunts. More of these supposed witches – most of them wholly innocent old women – were killed in Europe by Catholics than by Protestants; but, in the later stages of the Reformation, there was a terrible zeal for hunting down vulnerable old women and killing them.
Then there were the popes. Some of the Renaissance popes were disgraceful figures who took venality and immorality to obscene and barely credible levels. Some of them were warriors as much as religious leaders, notably the ever-bellicose Julius II. The most hapless popes were poor Leo X and then Clement VII. The latter simply could not deal with the blustering and bullying Henry VIII, and so he must take at least some of the blame, or credit, for the English Reformation. Clement also suffered the grotesque humiliation of the Sack of Rome in 1527, when the troops of a great Catholic potentate, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, breached the inadequate defences of Rome and then subjected the eternal city to a horrific orgy of slaughter and rapine. Priests were attacked with special ferocity, nuns were raped, churches were burned and the Tiber filled up with bodies. As Pope Clement and his cardinals cowered in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the Vatican itself was used a stable for the horses of looting, feral soldiers.
Lutherans gloated at these appalling scenes (the imperial army contained many German soldiers, some of whom were Lutherans), relishing the fact that they were perpetrated by the army of a great Catholic. Clement himself was never forgiven by the people of Rome for the sack – as if it was his fault. When he died, a group of citizens got hold of his corpse, mutilated it and drove a sword through his heart.
But the papacy’s greatest problem was posed not by Henry VIII or by the savage rabble that was Charles V’s army. The real problem was Luther. The first pope who had to deal with him, Leo X, was the wrong pope at the wrong time; he simply could not understand the scope of the challenge that the German presented.
The Catholic Church took a long time to regroup and renew. But, when the organised Catholic fightback, the Counter-Reformation, was under way, it was led by a series of quite splendid popes. Two of them were fierce puritans, men of almost superhuman austerity. The contrast with the worst of the Renaissance popes could hardly have been greater. The leading figure of fightback was, however, not a pope but a minor Spanish nobleman, Saint Ignatius Loyola, a magnificent man who equalled Luther in complexity and was almost his equal in his effect on the world.
The sixteenth century was a period of devastating and momentous change in Europe. Much of this change was intellectual and spiritual; much of it was violent and physical. And much of this was driven by people who were very complex. Some them were so complex as to be incapable of a concise summing-up.
The distinguished American scholar Richard Marius wrote of William Tyndale, perhaps the greatest writer of English that the Reformation produced – and that is high praise – in terms which suggest the essentially enigmatic nature of so many of these sixteenth-century figures. Marius concluded that Tyndale seemed to have been humourless and thoroughly unpleasant, and unable to keep a friend for long. Yet Marius also noted that he was a linguistic genius, as well as brave, constant and intelligent.
In his superb biography of Saint Thomas More, Marius judged that More would never be anything but a stranger to those who study him. He was a divided man. Of course, all human beings are to some extent complex; but, in the sixteenth century, most of the great figures had contradictory and ambiguous personalities. This makes them supremely interesting but most difficult to assess. Some of them, with their modern enthusiastic proponents and zealous detractors, divide to this day. Mary Queen of Scots is an excellent example.
This book is very much about personalities – kings, queens, popes and, above all, prophetic reformers. I strongly believe in the imprint of personality on history, though many modern historians are uneasy with this approach. But I also try, in the course of this book, to deal with the many aspects of the Reformation which transcend personality. However, before we turn to these, it is important to note that men like Luther, Calvin, Knox and Loyola were not other-worldly clerics. They knew real danger; they experienced physical terror.
Luther, fleeing for his life, had to ride fifty miles by night on an unsaddled and ill-tempered horse until he at last reached safety. On another occasion, when he was outlawed and under sentence of death, he was subjected to a false ‘kidnapping’ by his protector the Elector of Saxony, who then imprisoned him, for his own safety, in Wartburg Castle. Calvin had to flee from Paris in disguise; shortly afterwards, he had to leave his native France altogether, fearing for his life. Even in Geneva, the city he came to dominate, he had his enemies. Dogs were set on him; he was shot at. John Knox, as a low-born prisoner of the French, had to endure months of degrading and dangerous toil on the French galleys in the North Sea. Ignatius Loyola, who, unlike the first three, was a genuine soldier, suffered terrible wounds when he was defending the fortified walls of the city of Pamplona against the French. A cannonball smashed into him. For many months, he was in agony, not least because the subsequent surgery was botched – not once but twice.
When we come to issues rather than personalities, the most controversial and difficult is the extent to which the Reformation was a result of venality, slackness and abuse in the old Church. It is easy enough, for example, to describe with relish the depravity of the Renaissance popes. But it is also important to record that reform was already under way within the Roman Church when Luther’s Reformation started, though the process was weak and piecemeal.
It is also important to remember that men like Luther and Calvin were products of the old Church that they rebelled against. The young monk Luther received from the Church a fine education that was to stand him in good stead as he tore into what had nurtured him. Calvin was educated in Paris through the good offices of the old Church; it helped that his father, the clerk to a bishop, had Church connections.
The intellectual ground which was to prove so fertile for the Reformation had been tilled in advance by men who were not by nature fierce reformers. Rather, they were inquiring, sceptical, even satirical. Most of them were humanists – and the greatest of these was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the illegitimate son of a priest and a washerwoman, who himself became a priest – if an unusual one. He had a highly refined mind, but he was too witty, urbane and reasonable to become the booming, bruising force that Luther was. Erasmus and others like him softened up the cerebral climate, as if preparing for Luther’s more crude and potent assault on the orthodoxies of the times.
Luther grew up in a provincial part of a Germany that was disunited (he was to render it even more disunited) but increasingly nationalistic, impatient with the influence of Rome. Many of the German clergy were disliked to the point of detestation. Rightly or wrongly, the Roman Church was regarded as anti-German and as being responsible for economic exploitation and political interference. So, Luther unleashed his revolution in a Germany that was already seething with anti-Roman