Bab Bab 40 · The Age Of The Great Religious Controversies

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age of religious

controversy.

If you will notice you will find that almost everybody around you is

forever “talking economics” and discussing wages and hours of labor and

strikes in their relation to the life of the community, for that is the

main topic of interest of our own time.

The poor little children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared worse. They

never heard anything but “religion.” Their heads were filled with

“predestination,” “transubstantiation,” “free will,” and a hundred

other queer words, expressing obscure points of “the true faith,”

whether Catholic or Protestant. According to the desire of their

parents they were baptised Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists or

Zwinglians or Anabaptists. They learned their theology from the

Augsburg catechism, composed by Luther, or from the “institutes of

Christianity,” written by Calvin, or they mumbled the Thirty-Nine

Articles of Faith which were printed in the English Book of Common

Prayer, and they were told that these alone represented the “True

Faith.”

They heard of the wholesale theft of church property perpetrated

by King Henry VIII, the much-married monarch of England, who made

himself the supreme head of the English church, and assumed the old

papal rights of appointing bishops and priests. They had a nightmare

whenever some one mentioned the Holy Inquisition, with its dungeons and

its many torture chambers, and they were treated to equally horrible

stories of how a mob of outraged Dutch Protestants had got hold of a

dozen defenceless old priests and hanged them for the sheer pleasure

of killing those who professed a different faith. It was unfortunate

that the two contending parties were so equally matched. Otherwise the

struggle would have come to a quick solution. Now it dragged on for

eight generations, and it grew so complicated that I can only tell you

the most important details, and must ask you to get the rest from one

of the many histories of the Reformation.

[Illustration: THE INQUISITION]

The great reform movement of the Protestants had been followed by

a thoroughgoing reform within the bosom of the Church. Those popes

who had been merely amateur humanists and dealers in Roman and Greek

antiquities, disappeared from the scene and their place was taken by

serious men who spent twenty hours a day administering those holy

duties which had been placed in their hands.

The long and rather disgraceful happiness of the monasteries came to

an end. Monks and nuns were forced to be up at sunrise, to study the

Church Fathers, to tend the sick and console the dying. The Holy

Inquisition watched day and night that no dangerous doctrines should be

spread by way of the printing press. Here it is customary to mention

poor Galileo, who was locked up because he had been a little too

indiscreet in explaining the heavens with his funny little telescope

and had muttered certain opinions about the behaviour of the planets

which were entirely opposed to the official views of the church. But

in all fairness to the Pope, the clergy and the Inquisition, it ought

to be stated that the Protestants were quite as much the enemies of

science and medicine as the Catholics and with equal manifestations of

ignorance and intolerance regarded the men who investigated things for

themselves as the most dangerous enemies of mankind.

And Calvin, the great French reformer and the tyrant (both political

and spiritual) of Geneva, not only assisted the French authorities

when they tried to hang Michael Servetus (the Spanish theologian and

physician who had become famous as the assistant of Vesalius, the first

great anatomist), but when Servetus had managed to escape from his

French jail and had fled to Geneva, Calvin threw this brilliant man

into prison and after a prolonged trial, allowed him to be burned at

the stake on account of his heresies, totally indifferent to his fame

as a scientist.

And so it went. We have few reliable statistics upon the subject,

but on the whole, the Protestants tired of this game long before the

Catholics, and the greater part of honest men and women who were burned

and hanged and decapitated on account of their religious beliefs fell

as victims of the very energetic but also very drastic church of Rome.

For tolerance (and please remember this when you grow older), is of

very recent origin and even the people of our own so-called “modern

world” are apt to be tolerant only upon such matters as do not interest

them very much. They are tolerant towards a native of Africa, and

do not care whether he becomes a Buddhist or a Mohammedan, because

neither Buddhism nor Mohammedanism means anything to them. But when

they hear that their neighbour who was a Republican and believed in a

high protective tariff, has joined the Socialist party and now wants

to repeal all tariff laws, their tolerance ceases and they use almost

the same words as those employed by a kindly Catholic (or Protestant)

of the seventeenth century, who was informed that his best friend whom

he had always respected and loved had fallen a victim to the terrible

heresies of the Protestant (or Catholic) church.

“Heresy” until a very short time ago was regarded as a disease.

Nowadays when we see a man neglecting the personal cleanliness of his

body and his home and exposing himself and his children to the dangers

of typhoid fever or another preventable disease, we send for the

board-of-health and the health officer calls upon the police to aid him

in removing this person who is a danger to the safety of the entire

community. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a heretic, a man

or a woman who openly doubted the fundamental principles upon which

his Protestant or Catholic religion had been founded, was considered a

more terrible menace than a typhoid carrier. Typhoid fever might (very

likely would) destroy the body. But heresy, according to them, would

positively destroy the immortal soul. It was therefore the duty of all

good and logical citizens to warn the police against the enemies of

the established order of things and those who failed to do so were as

culpable as a modern man who does not telephone to the nearest doctor

when he discovers that his fellow-tenants are suffering from cholera or

small-pox.

In the years to come you will hear a great deal about preventive

medicine. Preventive medicine simply means that our doctors do not

wait until their patients are sick, then step forward and cure them.

On the contrary, they study the patient and the conditions under which

he lives when he (the patient) is perfectly well and they remove

every possible cause of illness by cleaning up rubbish, by teaching

him what to eat and what to avoid, and by giving him a few simple

ideas of personal hygiene. They go even further than that, and these

good doctors enter the schools and teach the children how to use

tooth-brushes and how to avoid catching colds.

The sixteenth century which regarded (as I have tried to show you)

bodily illness as much less important than sickness which threatened

the soul, organised a system of spiritual preventive medicine. As soon

as a child was old enough to spell his first words, he was educated

in the true (and the “only true”) principles of the Faith. Indirectly

this proved to be a good thing for the general progress of the people

of Europe. The Protestant lands were soon dotted with schools. They

used a great deal of very valuable time to explain the Catechism, but

they gave instruction in other things besides theology. They encouraged

reading and they were responsible for the great prosperity of the

printing trade.

But the Catholics did not lag behind. They too devoted much time and

thought to education. The Church, in this matter, found an invaluable

friend and ally in the newly-founded order of the Society of Jesus.

The founder of this remarkable organisation was a Spanish soldier who

after a life of unholy adventures had been converted and thereupon felt

himself bound to serve the church just as many former sinners, who

have been shown the errors of their way by the Salvation Army, devote

the remaining years of their lives to the task of aiding and consoling

those who are less fortunate.

The name of this Spaniard was Ignatius de Loyola. He was born in the

year before the discovery of America. He had been wounded and lamed for

life and while he was in the hospital he had seen a vision of the Holy

Virgin and her Son, who bade him give up the wickedness of his former

life. He decided to go to the Holy Land and finish the task of the

Crusades. But a visit to Jerusalem had shown him the impossibility of

the task and he returned west to help in the warfare upon the heresies

of the Lutherans.

In the year 1534 he was studying in Paris at the Sorbonne. Together

with seven other students he founded a fraternity. The eight men

promised each other that they would lead holy lives, that they would

not strive after riches but after righteousness, and would devote

themselves, body and soul, to the service of the Church. A few years

later this small fraternity had grown into a regular organisation and

was recognised by Pope Paul III as the Society of Jesus.

Loyola had been a military man. He believed in discipline, and absolute

obedience to the orders of the superior dignitaries became one of the

main causes for the enormous success of the Jesuits. They specialised

in education. They gave their teachers a most thorough-going education

before they allowed them to talk to a single pupil. They lived with

their students and they entered into their games. They watched them

with tender care. And as a result they raised a new generation of

faithful Catholics who took their religious duties as seriously as the

people of the early Middle Ages.

The shrewd Jesuits, however, did not waste all their efforts upon

the education of the poor. They entered the palaces of the mighty

and became the private tutors of future emperors and kings. And what

this meant you will see for yourself when I tell you about the Thirty

Years War. But before this terrible and final outbreak of religious

fanaticism, a great many other things had happened.

Charles V was dead. Germany and Austria had been left to his brother

Ferdinand. All his other possessions, Spain and the Netherlands and

the Indies and America had gone to his son Philip. Philip was the son

of Charles and a Portuguese princess who had been first cousin to

her own husband. The children that are born of such a union are apt

to be rather queer. The son of Philip, the unfortunate Don Carlos,

(murdered afterwards with his own father’s consent,) was crazy. Philip

was not quite crazy, but his zeal for the Church bordered closely upon

religious insanity. He believed that Heaven had appointed him as one of

the saviours of mankind. Therefore, whosoever was obstinate and refused

to share his Majesty’s views, proclaimed himself an enemy of the human

race and must be exterminated lest his example corrupt the souls of his

pious neighbours.

Spain, of course, was a very rich country. All the gold and silver

of the new world flowed into the Castilian and Aragonian treasuries.

But Spain suffered from a curious economic disease. Her peasants

were hard working men and even harder working women. But the better

classes maintained a supreme contempt for any form of labour, outside

of employment in the army or navy or the civil service. As for the

Moors, who had been very industrious artisans, they had been driven

out of the country long before. As a result, Spain, the treasure chest

of the world, remained a poor country because all her money had to be

sent abroad in exchange for the wheat and the other necessities of life

which the Spaniards neglected to raise for themselves.

[Illustration: THE NIGHT OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW]

Philip, ruler of the most powerful nation of the sixteenth century,

depended for his revenue upon the taxes which were gathered in the busy

commercial bee-hive of the Netherlands. But these Flemings and Dutchmen

were devoted followers of the doctrines of Luther and Calvin and they

had cleansed their churches of all images and holy paintings and

they had informed the Pope that they no longer regarded him as their

shepherd but intended to follow the dictates of their consciences and

the commands of their newly translated Bible.

This placed the king in a very difficult position. He could not

possibly tolerate the heresies of his Dutch subjects, but he needed

their money. If he allowed them to be Protestants and took no measures

to save their souls he was deficient in his duty toward God. If he

sent the Inquisition to the Netherlands and burned his subjects at the

stake, he would lose the greater part of his income.

Being a man of uncertain will-power he hesitated a long time. He tried

kindness and sternness and promises and threats. The Hollanders

remained obstinate, and continued to sing psalms and listen to the

sermons of their Lutheran and Calvinist preachers. Philip in his

despair sent his “man of iron,” the Duke of Alba, to bring these

hardened sinners to terms. Alba began by decapitating those leaders

who had not wisely left the country before his arrival. In the year

1572 (the same year that the French Protestant leaders were all

killed during the terrible night of Saint Bartholomew), he attacked

a number of Dutch cities and massacred the inhabitants as an example

for the others. The next year he laid siege to the town of Leyden, the

manufacturing center of Holland.

[Illustration: LEYDEN DELIVERED BY THE CUTTING OF THE DYKES]

Meanwhile, the seven small provinces of the northern Netherlands had

formed a defensive union, the so-called union of Utrecht, and had

recognised William of Orange, a German prince who had been the private

secretary of the Emperor Charles V, as the leader of their army and

as commander of their freebooting sailors, who were known as the

Beggars of the Sea. William, to save Leyden, cut the dykes, created a

shallow inland sea, and delivered the town with the help of a strangely

equipped navy consisting of scows and flat-bottomed barges which were

rowed and pushed and pulled through the mud until they reached the city

walls.

[Illustration: THE MURDER OF WILLIAM THE SILENT]

It was the first time that an army of the invincible Spanish king had

suffered such a humiliating defeat. It surprised the world just as the

Japanese victory of Mukden, in the Russian-Japanese war, surprised

our own generation. The Protestant powers took fresh courage and

Philip devised new means for the purpose of conquering his rebellious

subjects. He hired a poor half-witted fanatic to go and murder William

of Orange. But the sight of their dead leader did not bring the Seven

Provinces to their knees. On the contrary it made them furiously

angry. In the year 1581, the Estates General (the meeting of the

representatives of the Seven Provinces) came together at the Hague and

most solemnly abjured their “wicked king Philip” and themselves assumed

the burden of sovereignty which thus far had been invested in their

“King by the Grace of God.”

This is a very important event in the history of the great struggle

for political liberty. It was a step which reached much further than

the uprising of the nobles which ended with the signing of the Magna

Carta. These good burghers said “Between a king and his subjects

there is a silent understanding that both sides shall perform certain

services and shall recognise certain definite duties. If either party

fails to live up to this contract, the other has the right to consider

it terminated.” The American subjects of King George III in the year

1776 came to a similar conclusion. But they had three thousand miles

of ocean between themselves and their ruler and the Estates General

took their decision (which meant a slow death in case of defeat)

within hearing of the Spanish guns and although in constant fear of an

avenging Spanish fleet.

[Illustration: THE ARMADA IS COMING]

The stories about a mysterious Spanish fleet that was to conquer both

Holland and England, when Protestant Queen Elizabeth had succeeded

Catholic “Bloody Mary” was an old one. For years the sailors of the

waterfront had talked about it. In the eighties of the sixteenth

century, the rumour took a definite shape. According to pilots who had

been in Lisbon, all the Spanish and Portuguese wharves were building

ships. And in the southern Netherlands (in Belgium) the Duke of Parma

was collecting a large expeditionary force to be carried from Ostend to

London and Amsterdam as soon as the fleet should arrive.

In the year 1586 the Great Armada set sail for the north. But the

harbours of the Flemish coast were blockaded by a Dutch fleet and the

Channel was guarded by the English, and the Spaniards, accustomed to

the quieter seas of the south, did not know how to navigate in this

squally and bleak northern climate. What happened to the Armada once

it was attacked by ships and by storms I need not tell you. A few

ships, by sailing around Ireland, escaped to tell the terrible story of

defeat. The others perished and lie at the bottom of the North Sea.

Turn about is fair play. The British and the Dutch Protestants now

carried the war into the territory of the enemy. Before the end of the

century, Houtman, with the help of a booklet written by Linschoten

(a Hollander who had been in the Portuguese service), had at last

discovered the route to the Indies. As a result the great Dutch East

India Company was founded and a systematic war upon the Portuguese and

Spanish colonies in Asia and Africa was begun in all seriousness.

It was during this early era of colonial conquest that a curious

lawsuit was fought out in the Dutch courts. Early in the seventeenth

century a Dutch Captain by the name of van Heemskerk, a man who had

made himself famous as the head of an expedition which had tried to

discover the North Eastern Passage to the Indies and who had spent a

winter on the frozen shores of the island of Nova Zembla, had captured

a Portuguese ship in the straits of Malacca. You will remember that

the Pope had divided the world into two equal shares, one of which

had been given to the Spaniards and the other to the Portuguese. The

Portuguese quite naturally regarded the water which surrounded their

Indian islands as part of their own property and since, for the moment,

they were not at war with the United Seven Netherlands, they claimed

that the captain of a private Dutch trading company had no right to

enter their private domain and steal their ships. And they brought

suit. The directors of the Dutch East India Company hired a bright

young lawyer, by the name of De Groot or Grotius, to defend their case.

He made the astonishing plea that the ocean is free to all comers.

Once outside the distance which a cannon ball fired from the land can

reach, the sea is or (according to Grotius) ought to be, a free and

open highway to all the ships of all nations. It was the first time

that this startling doctrine had been publicly pronounced in a court of

law. It was opposed by all the other seafaring people. To counteract

the effect of Grotius’ famous plea for the “Mare Liberum,” or “Open

Sea,” John Selden, the Englishman, wrote his famous treatise upon the

“Mare Clausum” or “Closed Sea” which treated of the natural right of a

sovereign to regard the seas which surrounded his country as belonging

to his territory. I mention this here because the question had not yet

been decided and during the last war caused all sorts of difficulties

and complications.

[Illustration: THE DEATH OF HUDSON]

To return to the warfare between Spaniard and Hollander and Englishman,

before twenty years were over the most valuable colonies of the Indies

and the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon and those along the coast of

China and even Japan were in Protestant hands. In 1621 a West Indian

Company was founded which conquered Brazil and in North America built a

fortress called Nieuw Amsterdam at the mouth of the river which Henry

Hudson had discovered in the year 1609.

These new colonies enriched both England and the Dutch Republic to such

an extent that they could hire foreign soldiers to do their fighting on

land while they devoted themselves to commerce and trade. To them the

Protestant revolt meant independence and prosperity. But in many other

parts of Europe it meant a succession of horrors compared to which the

last war was a mild excursion of kindly Sunday-school boys.

The Thirty Years War which broke out in the year 1618 and which ended

with the famous treaty of Westphalia in 1648 was the perfectly natural

result of a century of ever increasing religious hatred. It was, as

I have said, a terrible war. Everybody fought everybody else and the

struggle ended only when all parties had been thoroughly exhausted and

could fight no longer.

In less than a generation it turned many parts of central Europe into

a wilderness, where the hungry peasants fought for the carcass of a

dead horse with the even hungrier wolf. Five-sixths of all the German

towns and villages were destroyed. The Palatinate, in western Germany,

was plundered twenty-eight times. And a population of eighteen million

people was reduced to four million.

The hostilities began almost as soon as Ferdinand II of the House of

Habsburg had been elected Emperor. He was the product of a most careful

Jesuit training and was a most obedient and devout son of the Church.

The vow which he had made as a young man, that he would eradicate all

sects and all heresies from his domains, Ferdinand kept to the best

of his ability. Two days before his election, his chief opponent,

Frederick, the Protestant Elector of the Palatinate and a son-in-law of

James I of England, had been made King of Bohemia, in direct violation

of Ferdinand’s wishes.

At once the Habsburg armies marched into Bohemia. The young king

looked in vain for assistance against this formidable enemy. The Dutch

Republic was willing to help, but, engaged in a desperate war of its

own with the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs, it could do little. The

Stuarts in England were more interested in strengthening their own

absolute power at home than spending money and men upon a forlorn

adventure in far away Bohemia. After a struggle of a few months, the

Elector of the Palatinate was driven away and his domains were given to

the Catholic house of Bavaria. This was the beginning of the great war.

Then the Habsburg armies, under Tilly and Wallenstein, fought their

way through the Protestant part of Germany until they had reached the

shores of the Baltic. A Catholic neighbour meant serious danger to

the Protestant king of Denmark. Christian IV tried to defend himself

by attacking his enemies before they had become too strong for him.

The Danish armies marched into Germany but were defeated. Wallenstein

followed up his victory with such energy and violence that Denmark was

forced to sue for peace. Only one town of the Baltic then remained in

the hands of the Protestants. That was Stralsund.

[Illustration: THE THIRTY YEARS WAR]

There, in the early summer of the year 1630, landed King Gustavus

Adolphus of the house of Vasa, king of Sweden, and famous as the man

who had defended his country against the Russians. A Protestant prince

of unlimited ambition, desirous of making Sweden the centre of a great

Northern Empire, Gustavus Adolphus was welcomed by the Protestant

princes of Europe as the saviour of the Lutheran cause. He defeated

Tilly, who had just successfully butchered the Protestant inhabitants

of Magdeburg. Then his troops began their great march through the heart

of Germany in an attempt to reach the Habsburg possessions in Italy.

Threatened in the rear by the Catholics, Gustavus suddenly veered

around and defeated the main Habsburg army in the battle of Lützen.

Unfortunately the Swedish king was killed when he strayed away from his

troops. But the Habsburg power had been broken.

Ferdinand, who was a suspicious sort of person, at once began to

distrust his own servants. Wallenstein, his commander-in-chief, was

murdered at his instigation. When the Catholic Bourbons, who ruled

France and hated their Habsburg rivals, heard of this, they joined the

Protestant Swedes. The armies of Louis XIII invaded the eastern part

of Germany, and Turenne and Condé added their fame to that of Baner

and Weimar, the Swedish generals, by murdering, pillaging and burning

Habsburg property. This brought great fame and riches to the Swedes

and caused the Danes to become envious. The Protestant Danes thereupon

declared war upon the Protestant Swedes who were the allies of the

Catholic French, whose political leader, the Cardinal de Richelieu,

had just deprived the Huguenots (or French Protestants) of those

rights of public worship which the Edict of Nantes of the year 1598 had

guaranteed them.

The war, after the habit of such encounters, did not decide anything,

when it came to an end with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The

Catholic powers remained Catholic and the Protestant powers stayed

faithful to the doctrines of Luther and Calvin and Zwingli. The Swiss

and Dutch Protestants were recognised as independent republics. France

kept the cities of Metz and Toul and Verdun and a part of Alsace. The

Holy Roman Empire continued to exist as a sort of scare-crow state,

without men, without money, without hope and without courage.

[Illustration: AMSTERDAM IN 1648]

The only good the Thirty Years War accomplished was a negative one.

It discouraged both Catholics and Protestants from ever trying it

again. Henceforth they left each other in peace. This however did not

mean that religious feeling and theological hatred had been removed

from this earth. On the contrary. The quarrels between Catholic and

Protestant came to an end, but the disputes between the different

Protestant sects continued as bitterly as ever before. In Holland

a difference of opinion as to the true nature of predestination (a

very obscure point of theology, but exceedingly important in the eyes

of your great-grandfather) caused a quarrel which ended with the

decapitation of John of Oldenbarneveldt, the Dutch statesman, who had

been responsible for the success of the Republic during the first

twenty years of its independence, and who was the great organising

genius of her Indian trading company. In England, the feud led to civil

war.

But before I tell you of this outbreak which led to the first execution

by process-of-law of a European king, I ought to say something about

the previous history of England. In this book I am trying to give

you only those events of the past which can throw a light upon the

conditions of the present world. If I do not mention certain countries,

the cause is not to be found in any secret dislike on my part. I wish

that I could tell you what happened to Norway and Switzerland and

Serbia and China. But these lands exercised no great influence upon

the development of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

I therefore pass them by with a polite and very respectful bow.

England however is in a different position. What the people of that

small island have done during the last five hundred years has shaped

the course of history in every corner of the world. Without a proper

knowledge of the background of English history, you cannot understand

what you read in the newspapers. And it is therefore necessary that you

know how England happened to develop a parliamentary form of government

while the rest of the European continent was still ruled by absolute

monarchs.