But, having unleashed the revolt, Luther soon showed his essentially conservative credentials when he identified with the established order during the Peasants’ War. He encouraged a brutal repression of the peasants. This was the time, more than any other, when he could not control his pen. Some of what he wrote was vile. He even told the secular princes that, in putting down the peasants’ revolt, they could gain heaven ‘more easily by bloodshed than by prayer’. This was Luther at his hellish worst, but it also indicated that here was a man with whom the German secular authorities could do business. Many of the German princes were deeply reassured by his response not just to the Peasants’ War but also to the extremely radical Anabaptists.
So, in Germany, it soon became clear that the Reformation was most likely to thrive where the secular power wanted it to. Luther himself wished to make a distinction between legitimate spiritual freedom and what he regarded as mere licence or anarchy. In much of Germany, his Reformation became the device of princes and magistrates.
In a relatively brief spell at the end of the 1530s and in the early 1540s, there was a genuine chance of long-term conciliation if not absolute consensus. It seemed for a time that, if everyone could calm down, the uproar might abate and compromise could be found. Moderates on the Catholic side – numinous men like Cardinals Reginald Pole and Gasparo Contarini – could talk freely and often agree with eminently reasonable Protestant colleagues like Martin Bucer and Philip Melanchthon. These four men continued the spirit of Erasmus in a way that their wilder leaders could not. But this ‘window of compromise’ was soon slammed shut.
When Luther died in 1546, about three-quarters of Germany was Protestant. How was this change marked? Perhaps the most obvious manifestation was that there were far fewer clergy around. And those who were around were probably married. This was a momentous change. Also, people had been encouraged to read the Bible for themselves; before, it had been, in the words of one historian, the Church’s best-kept secret. Now it had been translated by Luther into strong, vernacular German, and the printing presses had made it widely available. Partly because of this, there was a new impetus to literacy. Many monasteries and nunneries had disappeared; some had been confiscated by rapacious princes and minor landowners for their own ends; some had better fates, becoming hospitals or schools.
Norway, Sweden and Denmark were also Protestant. Then John Calvin took the Reformation to its more severe second stage, notably in Geneva, where he established what amounted to a unique theocratic republic. From there, his influence spread rapidly to his native France, to the Netherlands and, above all, to Scotland.
But, by now, the fightback, the Counter-Reformation, was well under way. The shock troops were the Jesuits; the most brutal method of recovery was through the dreaded Inquisition. At the protracted Council of Trent, in northern Italy, the Catholic Church began the tough tasks of redefining its doctrine and organising internal reform. The Reformation had made little impact in Italy and Spain; elsewhere, for example in Poland, there was a successful clawback as Protestantism became ever more fragmented and divisive.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the initial momentum was pretty well spent. Fissile movements, breakaways and extremism were to mark the progress of Protestantism, such as it was, in the seventeenth century. And today, 400 years on, the majority of European Christians are Catholic. Spectacle and hierarchy, both of which most of the early Protestants detested, are once again prevalent. Where Christianity is found, it often appeals to the senses rather than to the intellect. Unfortunately, from my point of view, most Europeans are probably neither Catholic nor Protestant. Western Europe is now the most secularised part of the entire world. If the natural condition of humanity is to be religious, this is not always apparent in today’s Europe.
I have tried to write about all this turbulence, both spiritual and secular, with sensitivity and sympathy. I am a Protestant, but I have tried throughout to be fair and balanced in my treatment of the Catholic Church. The Christian religion is many things. It is obviously in essence spiritual, but it also has its social, political and cultural aspects. In writing this personal survey, my main concern has been to remind people of the colossal significance of the Reformation, for me by far the most important event – or rather, movement – in European history.
And, as a Scot, I am well aware that it played a crucial role in the distinctive development of my own small but very influential nation. Calvin and, in particular, John Knox each had a great impact on the history of Scotland, and I believe it is time that we thought more about them and that we should not be content to dismiss them in negative and glib stereotyping. They both wanted people to apply their religion to all aspects of their everyday living, which in these secular times is not an easy concept to grasp. I also believe that they believed in freedom and equality as well as discipline and control. I think we owe them both a great deal.
This introduction sets out some of the principal themes of this book and is a kind of taster for some of the many episodes and events that will be described and analysed in greater detail later. Central to it all must be the towering figure of Luther, a man who started with no specific religious or political programme but who founded the most far-reaching evangelical revival our world has ever known. Some will no doubt be appalled that God has been mentioned only twice so far and Christ not at all. But they feature in the text that follows, I can assure you.
Luther wanted to return people to God. In his attempt to achieve this, he gave huge numbers of human beings the confidence to believe that their brains were as good as anyone else’s. He wanted people to read and think for themselves, to work things out with the help of the newly available Bible. In the present age, when many people are writing obituaries of the book, we should remember that Luther gave many people the special exhilaration of, for the first time, being able to handle, read and even own books. Whether his Reformation succeeded or not is a huge question, and I shall attempt an answer at the end of this book. What is certain is that Luther lit a great spiritual fire – and it is still burning today, if much less brightly.
PRELUDE
Two Kings, Two Kingdoms, One Church
CHAPTER 1
Henry VII of England
IN 1485, on a battlefield in the English Midlands, Henry Tudor, heavily outnumbered by the forces of the desperate King Richard III, managed to defeat the tyrant. Richard at least ended his dishonourable life by fighting heroically. His crown fell from his head as he was slain, and landed in a thorn bush. It was recovered and placed on the new king’s head. Thus commenced 118 years of Tudor rule. So, the story was romantic and in contrast to the essentially dour nature of Henry’s reign.
The Battle of Bosworth, in the East Midlands, lasted two hours or so and was not very bloody by the standards of the time. Only a few hundred died. The most notable of the fallen was of course King Richard III, the ‘crookback’, England’s most vilified monarch. Richard was almost certainly responsible for the murders of Henry VI and the two young princes – the sons of Edward IV – in the Tower of London. Tudor propagandists blackened his name with relish, as did Shakespeare in his melodrama Richard III. Many schoolchildren in the mid-1950s were taken to see the movie of Shakespeare’s play, in which Laurence Olivier directed himself. They were mesmerised by Olivier’s over-the-top performance as the evil king.
Shakespeare would have found it much more difficult to write a melodrama about Henry VII. He co-wrote, with John Fletcher, a play about the monstrous Henry VIII, Henry VII’s son and successor; but, understandably, he ignored Henry VII himself, who was not the stuff of drama. Henry VII was a very good king, but there was nothing flamboyant about him. In character, he was much more akin to his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth, justly the most celebrated of all English monarchs, than to the larger-than-life and brutish figure who was his son, Henry VIII. Although Henry VII gave his kingdom the priceless benefit of stability, history has not been kind to him. This is strange, for two reasons. First, his achievements were considerable. Second, he was the subject