Part 23 (1/2)
(3) Lastly, Luther had serious scruples on the question of employing force, and although he had finally sanctioned the appeal to arms, the war was to be a defensive one, waged by those in authority, and not in alliance with rebels. Luther had no idea of leading a religious and political crusade, or of promoting missionary enterprise outside Germany. For this the world had to look elsewhere.
The French have always been the most successful interpreters of new ideas to Europe. Their logical acuteness, their mastery of method, their gifts of organisation, as well as their language, with its matchless clearness and elasticity, have well fitted them for this office; and these gifts were now to be ill.u.s.trated in a pre-eminent degree by their great countryman John Calvin.
| John Calvin.
| Condition of Geneva.
This son of the notary in the episcopal court of Noyon in Picardy, was born in the year 1509. At the age of twelve he had been appointed to a chaplaincy in the cathedral, and received the tonsure. But, though he subsequently became a cure, he never proceeded any further in clerical orders; for his father, thinking that the legal profession offered more promise, sent him to Orleans, and then to Bourges to study law, 1529-1531. It was during these years that Calvin fell under the influence of Lutheran teachers, notably of Jacques Lefevre, a man of Picardy like himself, and one of the fathers of French Protestantism. In the year 1534, Calvin was driven from his country by the persecutions inst.i.tuted by Francis I., and retired to Basle. Here at the age of twenty-five he published the first edition of his great work, _The Inst.i.tutes_, a manual of Christian religion, which, although subsequently enlarged, contains a complete outline of his theological system, and which probably has exercised a more profound influence than any other book written by so young a man. In the year 1536, as he pa.s.sed through Geneva, he was induced by the solemn adjurations of William Farel of Dauphine, a French exile himself, to abandon the studies he so dearly loved, and devote himself to missionary effort. The imperial city of Geneva was of importance because it commanded the valley of the Rhone, and the commercial routes which united there; it enjoyed munic.i.p.al self-government, but was under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of its bishop and was threatened by the Duke of Savoy, who held the surrounding country and possessed certain judicial powers within the town itself. To emanc.i.p.ate themselves more completely from this double yoke of ecclesiastical and temporal authority was the constant aim of the patriots of Geneva, and with that view they had made an alliance with the canton of Freibourg in 1519, and that of Bern in 1526. An intermittent struggle had ensued, which was embittered by the adoption of the Lutheran Doctrine by the city in 1535, at the instigation of Farel. In 1536, war had broken out between the Duke and the canton of Bern, when the Swiss succeeded in conquering the whole of the country of Vaud, and thus relieved Geneva of all immediate danger from the Duke.
| Calvin at Geneva, 1536-1538, 1541-1564.
Calvin, induced to stay in Geneva at this moment, commenced forthwith to found a Christian church after the model of the _Inst.i.tutes_; but the severity of his system led to a reaction, and caused his exile, and that of Farel, in 1538. Three years afterwards (September 1541), the city, torn by internal discord, and afraid of being conquered either by the Duke, who was supported by the Catholics within the walls, or by Bern, which courted the Protestants, recalled the Reformer, and accepted his system of church-government. Leaving the munic.i.p.al government of the city intact, he set up by its side an ecclesiastical consistory, consisting of the pastors, and twelve elders elected from the two councils of the town on the nomination of the clergy. The jurisdiction of this consistory was nominally confined to morals, and the regulation of Church matters. It could only punish by penance, and by exclusion from the Sacrament, but as it was the duty of the secular authority to enforce its decisions, every sin became a crime, punished with the utmost severity. All were forced by law to attend public wors.h.i.+p, and partake of the Lord's Supper. To wear clothes of a forbidden stuff, to dance at a wedding, to laugh at Calvin's sermons, became an offence punishable at law. Banishment, imprisonment, sometimes death, were the penalties inflicted on unchast.i.ty, and a child was beheaded for having struck his parents. When offences such as these were so severely visited, we cannot wonder that heresy did not escape. In 1547, Gruet was executed, and in 1553, Servetus was burnt. This remorseless tyranny, which reminds one forcibly of the rule of Savonarola, was not established without opposition. A party termed the Libertines was formed, who endeavoured to relax the severity of the discipline, and to vindicate the independence of the secular authority. Nevertheless Calvin, aided by the French exiles who crowded into Geneva and obtained the freedom of the city and a share in the government, successfully maintained his supremacy until his death in 1564, when he was succeeded by his pupil, Theodore Beza.
Geneva had been relieved from fear of attack from the Duke of Savoy by the French conquest of his country in 1543, and although, in the October of the year in which Calvin died, the Duke obtained from Bern a restoration of all the country south of the Lake of Geneva which it had seized in 1536, he did not make any attempt on the city itself. Geneva continued to be an independent republic, forming from time to time alliances with some of the Swiss cantons, till 1815, when she finally became a member of the Swiss Confederation.
| Characteristics of Calvinism.
The predominant characteristic of the teaching of Calvin lies in its eclecticism. In his doctrinal views: in his tenets as to Predestination, the Eucharist, and the unquestioned authority of Scripture to the exclusion of tradition, he approached the views of Zwingle rather than those of Luther. But if in so doing he represents the most uncompromising and p.r.o.nounced antagonism to the teaching of Rome, yet in his conviction that outside the Church there is no salvation, and in the overwhelming authority he ascribes to her, he rea.s.serts the most extravagant tenets of Catholicism, and revives the spirit of Hebraism. That the religion he established, if not exactly ascetic, was gloomy beyond measure; that it has inspired no art except, perhaps, certain forms of literature; that his principles of church-government, though founded on a democratic basis, in practice destroyed all individual liberty; that, so far from advancing the spirit of toleration, they necessarily involved persecution--all this must be admitted. His strong predestinarian views, if logically acted up to, ought to have led to a fatalistic spirit most dangerous to morals, and paralysed action, as perhaps they have in a few cases. But few sane men have ever believed themselves to be eternally reprobate, or acted as if they disbelieved in free-will. The practical results of Calvinism have therefore been to produce a type of men like the founder himself, John Knox, and Theodore Beza, men of remarkable strength of will, extraordinary devotion, and indomitable energy, and to furnish a creed for the most uncompromising opponents of Rome.
Henceforth Geneva was to become the citadel of the Reformers; the refuge of those who had to fly from other lands; the home of the printing-press whence innumerable pamphlets were despatched; the school whence missionaries went forth to preach; the representative of the most militant form of Protestantism on a republican basis; the natural and inevitable enemy of the Counter-Reformation which was the ally of the Jesuits, and of the monarchical forces of Catholic Europe, headed by Spain.
CHAPTER VII
PHILIP AND SPAIN
Persecution of the Protestants--The mystery of Don Carlos--Wars against the Moors and Turks--Relief of Malta--Persecution and Rebellion of the Moriscoes--Battle of Lepanto--Conquest of Portugal--Internal Government of Spain and its dependencies under Philip II.
-- 1. _Persecution of the Protestants--The Inquisition._
| Philip lands in Spain. Aug. 29, 1559.
At the date of the Treaty of Cateau Cambresis (April 5, 1559), Philip was in his thirty-second year. He had already wedded and lost two wives. His first, Maria of Portugal, had died, in giving birth to Don Carlos, on July 8, 1545; his second, Mary of England, on 17th November 1558. After having settled the government of the Netherlands (cf.
p. 319 ff.), Philip proceeded to Spain. A furious tempest greeted his arrival; nine vessels of his fleet were lost; and the King himself landed on the sh.o.r.es of his kingdom--which he was never to leave again--in a small boat.
| He devotes himself to the extirpation of | Protestantism.
Philip had not hitherto displayed those bigoted views of which he henceforth became the exponent. During his brief residence in England he had, in the vain attempt to conciliate the English, opposed or pretended to oppose the policy of persecution adopted by his unhappy wife. He had intervened to protect the Princess Elizabeth, and after her accession had first proposed to marry her, and, when that was refused, had continued on friendly terms. He even gave the Calvinists of Scotland his tacit support against Mary of Guise and her daughter. No sooner, however, did he finally settle in Spain than all was changed. Spain was the representative of all that was most fanatical in Europe, and Philip eagerly adopted the views of that country. Henceforth the increase of his own authority, and the advance of Catholicism, became identified; the reformed opinions were in his eyes a gospel of rebellion and of opposition to authority, and to crush out this pernicious heresy under his absolute rule became the principle of his life.
During the early years of Charles V., a few Spaniards abroad had adopted reformed opinions, such as Francis de Enzinas, the translator of the New Testament into Spanish, and subsequently Professor of Greek at Oxford (1520-1522); while in 1553 Servetus the anti-Trinitarian suffered at Geneva. But it was not until the year 1558 that Protestantism seems to have made much head in Spain itself. By that time, however, not only had Spanish translations of the New Testament and various Protestant books been disseminated in Spain, but a considerable congregation of Reformers had been secretly formed, more especially in the towns of Seville, Valladolid, and Zamora, and in the kingdom of Aragon. On receiving intelligence of this new nest of heretics, Pope Paul IV. issued a brief, February 1558, in which he urged the Inquisitor-General to spare no efforts in exterminating this evil; and the dying Emperor, forgetting his dislike of papal interference, besought the Regent Joanna, and Philip himself, to listen to the Pope's exhortations. Philip required no urging. He published an edict, borrowed from the Netherlands, which condemned all to the stake who bought, sold, or read prohibited books, and revived a law by which the accuser was to receive one-fourth of the property of the condemned. Paul enforced the law by his Bull of 1559, commanding all confessors to urge on their penitents the duty of informing against suspected persons. He also authorised the Inquisition to deliver to the secular arm even those who abjured their errors, 'not from conviction, but from fear of punishment,' and made a grant from the ecclesiastical revenues of Spain to defray the expenses of the Inquisition.
| The Inquisition.
| The Inquisition and the Spanish Church.
This terrible tribunal, which had been established in its final form by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1478, and freed from appeal to Rome in 1497, consisted of a Supreme Council formed of lawyers and theologians, mostly Dominicans, an order to which Philip showed especial favour. At the head of this Council stood the Grand Inquisitor, appointed by the king himself, with numerous subordinate tribunals, protected by armed 'familiars.' Their trials were conducted in secret. Persons were tempted or forced by threats to denounce their enemies, their friends, and even their relatives; a system of espionage was resorted to; torture was freely used to extort confessions from the accused; and the most harmless words were often twisted into heterodoxy by the subtle refinements of the Dominican theologians. They punished by forfeiture of goods, by penance, by imprisonment, and in the last resort handed over the condemned to the secular arm, to be burnt at an _Auto da fe_. Supported by this unwonted harmony between Pope and King, the Grand Inquisitor, Don Fernando Valdes, Archbishop of Seville, set vigorously to work. In Seville alone, 800 were arrested on the first day, and on May 21, 1559, the first of the _Autos da fe_ took place in the streets of Valladolid; another was solemnised on the arrival of Philip in Spain, and a third amid the _fetes_ attending his marriage with his third wife, Elizabeth of France, in 1560. Indeed, no great ceremonial was for some years considered complete unless sanctified by an _Auto da fe_, and the Spaniards preferred one to a bull-fight. It may be true that the cruelties of the Inquisition have been exaggerated; yet, at least, opinions, which in other countries would have been tolerated, were ruthlessly suppressed. Not only was all scientific speculation tabooed, and Spanish scholars forbidden to visit other countries, but the slightest deviation from the strictest orthodoxy was severely visited. The Inquisition was even used against the Church. Although the number of the clergy and the monks was very large, and their wealth, especially in Castile, enormous, no Church in Europe was more completely under royal control. The nomination to ecclesiastical offices was exclusively in the hands of the king; papal interference, unless by his leave, was stoutly resisted; and, if the Church was rich, at least one-third of its revenues fell into the royal coffers. The power of the crown was also enhanced by the devotion of the Jesuits to the royal cause. It was, however, on the Dominicans that Philip mostly relied. The ignorance and bigotry of the members of this order of friars in Spain is only equalled by their subservience to the royal will. They dominated the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and subjected to its discipline not only Theresa, one of the most devoted of Spanish saints, but the members of the powerful Society of Jesus, and even the episcopal bench itself. No less than nine bishops were condemned to various acts of penance; even Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, was attacked. This learned and zealous prelate, who had taken an important part in some of the sessions of the Council of Trent, and in whose arms Charles V. had died, was charged in August, 1559, with heterodox opinions. After his trial had dragged on for more than seven years, Pius V. insisted on the case being transferred to Rome. But the death of the Pope again delayed the matter, and it was not until April 1576 that the papal decision was finally given. The Archbishop was convicted of holding doctrines akin to those of Luther, and was to abjure sixteen propositions found in his writings; he was to do certain acts of penance; to be suspended from his episcopal functions for five years more, and meanwhile to be confined in a convent of the Dominicans, his own order, at Orvieto.
| The Inquisition used to punish political offences.