Chapter 14

Making a Break: The Reformation

In This Chapter

Understanding the Church’s loss of authority

Insisting on faith: Luther’s protest

Spurring revolution in the name of religion

Declaring divine right: Henry VIII’s break from Rome

Starting with a disagreement over faith and turning political almost immediately, the Protestant Reformation provoked war and even revolution. It rearranged Europe’s power structure. In its wake, the Holy Roman Empire was nearly ruined, and Spain, that most unshakeable of Catholic countries (see Chapter 10), fell into decline.

In this chapter, I guide you through causes and effects of this religious revolution, which spread beyond Europe and eventually around the world.

Cracks in the Catholic Monopoly

To understand how the Reformation began, it helps to consider how ready some people were to rebel against the Catholic Church, which was essentially the only Christian church in Europe. They rebelled for reasons that often had little or nothing to do with the question of how to get into heaven. As in so many conflicts, the reasons included:

Money: Many nobles (and commoners, too) thought that the Church had too much of it and demanded too much of theirs.

Land and other property: Regional and national rulers thought the Church possessed and controlled too much of it.

Power and autonomy: Local rulers, especially in Germany, wanted to wrest power, especially economic control, away from the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor.

Losing authority

How vulnerable to a shake-up was the Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century? Pretty vulnerable, given that Renaissance trends undercut the Church’s authority.

For one, the pre-Christian authors (those ancient Greek and Greek-style philosophers that I keep harping about) became part of Christendom during the Renaissance. These Classical authors now were seen as manifestations of God’s glory, but their voices and views were diverse and contradictory. Where once there was one supreme source of wisdom — the Church — now wisdom came in a variety of flavors.

The Church even lost its monopoly on interpreting scripture. The first mass-produced book was the Bible, and printers quickly saw how newly literate Europeans wanted to read in their own languages instead of in Latin or Greek. Scholars started translating the Bible into vernacular (common) languages. Desiderius Erasmus, the most famous scholar of the time, was a prolific translator of scripture.

For more on the effects of the Renaissance on the Church establishment, turn to Chapter 13.

Satirizing the Church

The scholar Erasmus, who was from the Netherlands and lived in England, also wrote original works saying things that many people agreed with but that few stated as eloquently as he did. In 1509, he ridiculed silly, lazy, and incompetent churchmen in a popular satire called The Praise of Folly. Erasmus wasn’t anti-Church, but he thought the Church could be run better.

 The Catholic Church was a huge, international bureaucracy with layers upon layers of officials. (Remember that virtually every Christian in Western Europe at this time — almost everybody — belonged to one church, the one based in Rome. That’s why it was called the Church with a capital C. The word Catholic, which means “universal,” was part of its name, but there was no reason to say so because there were no Protestants — yet.) Like bureaucrats anywhere, some Church officials were inefficient, lazy, and dishonest. Imagine how much worse your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles would be if rude, slow clerks claimed divine authority. (What’s that? They already do?)

For centuries, there was a widespread feeling that churchmen had it too easy. Folks thought too many priests were hypocrites for telling the rest of society what to do while living in sin themselves. Erasmus knew about such resentment firsthand, because he started life in Rotterdam as the illegitimate son of a priest.

Some bishops, who were at a higher level of the priesthood and sworn to celibacy, kept mistresses and then used Church influence to get advantages for their out-of-wedlock offspring. Even popes had children. Pope Alexander VI, who served from 1492–1503, had many mistresses and many kids, and Pope Clement VII, who precipitated a separate branch of the Reformation in England by refusing to annul the marriage of King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon (coming up in this chapter in the section “Spreading Reform to England”), reportedly fathered a son.

Alexander, Clement, and Pope Leo X (who was pope when the Reformation began in 1517) were all privileged men from wealthy families who received cushy Church positions by virtue of their connections. For example, Leo began life as Giovanni de Medici, of the powerful Medici family that controlled the city-state of Florence (see Chapter 13 for more on the Medicis). Leo nearly wiped out the Vatican treasury with his extravagant lifestyle.

Pope Leo X pampered himself with the Church’s money, but he also spent it on Renaissance glories. He accelerated construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, a landmark of the period’s architecture, and he enlarged the Vatican library. Many Christians, especially in Northern Europe, weren’t impressed with these developments; they were tired of seeing their hard-earned coins carted off to Rome to pay for sculptures and painted ceilings. “What good do those things do us?” asked the Germans and the Swiss.

 Don’t get the impression that all priests (or monks, bishops, cardinals, and popes) were hypocritical or corrupt. Many, and probably most, led devout lives of worship, service to others, and self sacrifice. Those honest churchmen, such as German priest and university professor Martin Luther, resented the bad reputation that followed their corrupt brothers and rubbed off on the Church at large. Church officials promised reforms, and some really tried to clean things up, but abuses persisted.

Erasmus wasn’t the first to mock or criticize churchmen. John Wycliffe, an English priest and theologian, had anticipated the Reformation by more than a century when, in the 1370s, he began attacking the worldliness of the Church. Wycliffe argued for limited papal authority over government matters and insisted that churchmen who fell into mortal sin forfeit their authority. But Erasmus’s international prominence (he was widely read) and the timing of The Praise of Folly directly paved the way for a widespread public criticism of Church abuses — one that followed his book by less than a decade. It has been said that Erasmus laid the egg, and Martin Luther hatched it.

Luther Challenges the System

Many of history’s great changes can be traced to a visionary, someone who did what it took to make a dream come true. Martin Luther wasn’t one of those visionaries: He didn’t set out to trigger religious revolt, let alone unleash international tensions, but that’s what he did.

Luther — a monk, priest, and theology professor at Wittenberg University — pondered the individual’s relationship to God. His thoughts on that topic interacted with other forces building in Europe in the early sixteenth century, starting a movement that profoundly changed the world even beyond Europe and North America (a continent most Europeans hadn’t yet heard of when the Reformation began). Yet it all began with a rather small gesture: a one-man protest.

 Luther possessed deep moral conviction, powerful faith, and incredibly stubborn resolve. But if he had known that he was going to split the Church six ways to Sunday, he might not have tacked his protest literature on the door of a Wittenberg church on October 31, 1517. The 95 Theses (which means 95 arguments) was a list of Luther’s objections to the way that Church leaders in his neck of Europe (Germany) sold indulgences, a kind of official forgiveness for sins.

Selling salvation

An indulgence was a grant of forgiveness, issued either to a living person or to someone who had died and whose soul was believed to be in purgatory (a sort of anteroom in which sinners must be cleansed before entering heaven).

 You can think of an indulgence like this: Suppose you do a good deed. Your reward is that God doesn’t make you suffer so much for your bad deeds, so you get into heaven a little more easily. Now, suppose you need a good deed to earn this consideration. Doesn’t giving the Church money count as a good deed?

But what if your brother died before he could build up his spiritual credits? Not a problem. You, his surviving relative, can give money to the Church by purchasing an indulgence, and then transfer your credit to your bro, getting him off the hook in the afterlife.

Okay, so that’s a simplistic explanation of the concept, which also involved a sort of bank account of godly merit, built up through the good works of Jesus and the saints. The important thing to remember is that the practice of selling indulgences led to an impression among common people that they could buy an express, one-way ticket to heaven.

Peddling to pay the pope

In crafting and posting his 95 Theses, Martin Luther was ticked off in particular at a Dominican friar called Tetzel, who traveled around peddling indulgences. (The word friar meant “brother,” and it was used for men who were members of certain religious orders, such as the Dominicans.)

Tetzel came into a village or city and gathered a crowd, much as a snake-oil salesman would in a frontier American town three centuries later. Imagine Tetzel hawking indulgences as if they were the latest things in patent medicines for your soul.

Why did he do it? Well, Tetzel was not an entrepreneur, as it may seem. He was a deputy sent out by the newly appointed Archbishop of Mainz.

Another Church practice that bred widespread skepticism was that anyone appointed to a high ecclesiastical office, such as archbishop, had to pay fees to the pope as a sort of recompense for the appointment. If that sounds like a kickback, you’ve got the idea. In 1514, when the Archbishop of Mainz got his job, Pope Leo X was spending a lot of money in Rome — especially on the building of St. Peter’s Basilica. And so Leo set a high fee.

The new Archbishop of Mainz lacked ready cash, so he borrowed from an Augsburg family called Fugger. (No remarks, please.) Powerful banking families, another Renaissance phenomenon that started in Italy, had risen in northern Europe by this time. (The Welser family, also of Augsburg, was the other big banking force in Germany.)

The archbishop needed to repay the Fuggers. To help, the pope gave him an easy way to raise funds: He made the archbishop regional distributor for holy indulgences. Tetzel was the archbishop’s sales rep.

Insisting on faith

If you wanted to rub Martin Luther the wrong way, you couldn’t come up with a better method than mass-marketing indulgences. As a theology teacher, Luther had thought hard about the correct path to heaven. What did God expect of a Christian?

He decided that God was merciful. As Luther saw it, you must honestly believe. Belief, rather than good works, was the key. In some ways, Luther reflected the Renaissance philosophy of humanism (see Chapter 13) in that he saw a direct relationship between the individual mortal and God. But in other ways, Luther returned to St. Augustine’s idea that good works on Earth won’t earn you entrance to heaven (see Chapter 12). Instead, you had to rely on God’s grace.

Luther thought that a good Christian would do good works — go to church, pray, and be kind to others — as a result of belief, not as a way to escape punishment or win reward. How much one paid to an itinerant salesman monk didn’t count at all toward eternal bliss.

In his theses, Luther condemned the indulgence campaign as exploitation, and he slammed the corrupt clerical bureaucracy. But he didn’t mean to raise a call for mass rebellion. As a scholar, he observed a tradition that had grown up in the medieval universities: Professors argued points of religion. Luther thought that Tetzel was wrong, so he challenged anyone who supported Tetzel to a debate. He did this on October 31, or All Hallows Eve (the night before November 1, All Souls Day), but this was no trick-or-treat prank. By pinning his theses to the door of the church, Luther issued a public challenge.

A Precarious Holy Roman Empire

 Besides the writings of Erasmus and a general unhappiness with the Church, there were other reasons Europe, and especially Germany, were ready to erupt early in the sixteenth century. (Keep in mind that Germany wasn’t Germany yet; that wouldn’t happen for centuries. It was the Holy Roman Empire, a messy conglomeration of semi-independent states where Germany and Austria are today.)

It had been a long time since the Holy Roman Empire embodied the vision held by the pope when he crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the West in 800 AD. The emperor was supposed to serve as the pope’s partner and chief protector of the Church (see Chapter 6), but popes and emperors quarreled often and bitterly.

Searching for sources of cash

When Luther posted his theses, the emperor was Maximilian I, who ruled from 1493–1519. In Chapter 13, I discuss how Max hooked up with Spain to attack the French in Italy. A big reason for that excursion was that the emperor, like everybody else in this story, needed money.

Max enjoyed spending his dough on art. He also liked hunting, flashy clothes, and armor — the perks of being the emperor. Beyond that, he had expensive plans to strengthen the empire. Even money couldn’t help him there, however, as long as the individual German princes, whose land made up the empire, held power in their own hands. They were getting stronger and turning their states into little nations.

Max was so strapped for cash sometimes that he couldn’t pay his soldiers, or landsknechts. This made it hard for him to keep an army. Sometimes the landsknechts hired themselves out as mercenary units, even to the emperor’s enemies. Some even resorted to robbery and extortion.

Fighting crime and inflation

Times were hard for other Germans, too. With no strong national government to keep order, and with the line between knight and robber blurred, merchants had to pay protection money or hire their own muscle just to transport goods safely. The high cost of shipping contributed to inflation. Prices rose, not just in Germany, but all over Europe.

The situation was more complex than this (isn’t everything?), but the inflation also was tied to an increase in population. A decrease in the number of people in Europe caused by the bubonic plague helped bring about the Renaissance, because plague survivors and their children had more material wealth to go around. (For more on the bubonic plague, turn to Chapter 7.)

Good times bred more people, however, and by the sixteenth century, the population burgeoned. People needed work, food, clothing, and shelter, but there wasn’t enough for everybody. Things cost more despite the fact that no one had more money to pay. The price of a loaf of bread, for example, just about quadrupled between 1500 and 1600.

Cash-strapped landlords put the squeeze on peasants in order to get more work for less. People were poor, overworked, overtaxed, hungry, and nervous about both their present and future.

Setting the stage for dissent

Crises of finances, violence, and hunger all help explain why Luther’s protest became more than a theological discussion. People took the 95 Theses as a rallying cry against the Church and its high-handedness. Some who agreed with the priest copied Luther’s arguments, took them to printing shops, and sent copies all over Germany and beyond. Luther was suddenly famous.

Luther’s action still wouldn’t have had quite the impact it did, however, if rulers hadn’t also been ready to challenge the Church. Some German princes were as edgy as their subjects were. They sought to limit the emperor’s meddling in their kingdoms, and they were even more resistant to the pope sticking his nose where they thought it didn’t belong.

Seven German princes called the electors got to choose the emperor (see Chapter 13). One of them — Frederick, Prince Elector of Saxony — backed Martin Luther in the religious dispute that broke out after 1517. Frederick didn’t necessarily agree with Luther, but because Frederick had founded the University of Wittenberg not many years before, he had a stake in protecting his faculty member, the overnight celebrity.

Standing Up to the Emperor

When Martin Luther really needed a friend, Frederick, Prince Elector of Saxony — known as Frederick the Wise — came through for him. It happened shortly after Emperor Charles V, who succeeded his grandfather Maximilian I in 1519, tried to make Luther change what he had said about indulgences and the Church.

Charles made his challenge in 1521 at the Diet of Worms. It wasn’t nearly as disgusting as it sounds. In the Holy Roman Empire, the word diet had nothing to do with NutriSystem. A diet (from the medieval Latin dieta, meaning “a day’s work”) was an all-day meeting — a day in court, or in this case, the Imperial Assembly. Worms referred to a city rather than a mess of tubular, dirt-dwelling animals. (Worms is on the Rhine River near Mannheim, Germany.) At the Diet of Worms, Emperor Charles V met with the empire’s princes and with churchmen, including Luther. Although no one asked him to ingest squirmy, legless invertebrates, Luther gagged anyway — at the suggestion he give ground.

Oh, he thought about it. When the emperor tells you to change your tune, you have to at least think about it. Luther turned the issue over and over in his mind before he came back the next morning with his answer.

 Luther faced up to the emperor, the princes, and the bishops and said, “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.” At least, that’s how the story goes. There’s some doubt over whether he ever really said that, but it’s too good a quote to throw away (so here I quote it; I can do no other). Whether those were his exact words or not (and, come to think of it, he didn’t even speak English), they sum up what Luther meant.

 In the 2003 movie Luther, Joseph Fiennes doesn’t speak any English, either, but the DVD includes English subtitles. This German biopic takes some liberties with the facts (as all movies do), but it vividly portrays the tensions and excitement of the time. Sir Peter Ustinov, in one of his last films, plays Frederick the Wise.

Luther Gains a Following

After the Diet of Worms, Martin Luther was an outlaw, and he headed home to Wittenberg to prepare for his arrest and a probable death sentence. But on the way, he disappeared. It turned out that Prince Frederick’s men kidnapped him. The prince elector locked Luther up for his own protection.

In the castle of Wartburg, Prince Freddy gave Luther a study in which to work, and work he did. Instead of taking back his theses, Luther noisily attacked other beliefs of the Church. Realizing the power of the printing press, he published his ideas — among them his claims that priests weren’t the big deal they thought they were. You could get into heaven without one, Luther said. It was cut-out-the-middle-man spirituality. Luther said that Christians should read the Bible for themselves, and he translated his own user-friendly German version. He also wrote both words and music for hymns such as “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” — the theme song of the Reformation.

A pamphlet he published in 1520, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nations, was especially popular. Some nobles, scholars, and other people who agreed with Luther’s writings began to think of themselves as his followers. Just a few years after the 95 Theses, some Christians began to call themselves Lutherans.

 The German princes, especially the less devout among them, tended to like Luther’s argument that they had a duty to put the Church back in its place. In those times of inflation, a reasoned excuse for confiscating the Church’s wealth appealed to free-spending aristocrats. If a powerful noble or merchant became a Lutheran, it often meant that his followers, people who depended on him for their livings, became Lutheran, too — by persuasion or coercion.

Losing control of the Lutheran movement

Anti-Church sentiment, once unleashed, flew out of control. A bunch of knights attacked the Archbishop of Trier in 1522 in an attempt to oust him in the name of Luther. (Luther had nothing to do with it.) Other malcontents, among them former Catholic priests and self-appointed preachers, used Luther’s rebellion as a jumping-off point to spread radical ideas far beyond Luther’s. They said nobles and the rich should embrace the poor and share the wealth. Luther was much too conservative to have taught such a thing, but there was so much pent-up discontent that the extreme ideas took hold and spread.

Unrest turned to violence in 1524 as the Peasants’ War ripped through central and southwestern Germany and into Austria. “Hey,” said Luther, “this wasn’t supposed to happen.” (My own loose translation.) He thought people who twisted his teachings were even more wicked than churchmen who sold indulgences. On this topic, he wrote a scathing pamphlet titled, Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of the Peasants.

Luther urged the German princes to crush the rebels. The princes complied (as they would have without Luther’s encouragement), calling in soldier-for-hire landsknechts. Thousands of peasants died in battle, and more were captured and put to death.

Choosing sides

After the Peasants’ War nastiness was settled, the German princes tried to sort out what to do about Lutheranism. Several sided with Luther. After all, he had sided with them. More to the point, Lutheranism offered them freedom to rule with less interference from Emperor Charles and none from the pope. Some Lutheran partisans formally broke religious ties with Rome and set up their own Lutheran churches. Other princes stuck with Rome and tried to force the Lutheran princes to change their minds.

The Lutheran rulers came to be known as Protestants, because they protested their peers’ attempts to force them back into the old Church. In 1531, they formed a mutual protection alliance, the Schmalkald League. Their relations with Paul III (who became pope in 1534) and Emperor Charles further deteriorated.

The Empire Strikes Back

 Charles V was Holy Roman Emperor from 1519–1558. As the Protestant movement grew, Charles V’s resources were strained for reasons I discuss in Chapter 13. He was fighting in Italy and taking care of his lands in Spain. He also had a major rivalry with the French. He didn’t want to fight the Protestant princes. He wanted to settle the issue with diplomacy.

Finally despairing of that option, the emperor marched an army into Germany in 1546, the same year Luther died. Thus began the first of the Religious Wars of the sixteenth century.

Savoring a bitter victory

In 1547, at the Battle of Mühlberg, Emperor Charles led the loyal Catholic princes of the Holy Roman Empire against the rebel Protestant princes, who had joined together in an alliance called the Schmalkald League. Although Charles’s forces defeated them handily, the Protestants wouldn’t submit. In the Treaty of Passeau, which ended the war in 1552, Charles offered to make changes in the Catholic Church if they would support him. (Pope Paul III was actually working on reforms of the Counter-Reformation.) The Protestants stood fast.

Even more frustrating for the emperor: Some of the Catholic princes who had been loyal to him during the war started to worry that, with the Protestants defeated, the emperor was getting too powerful. As a result, they turned on him and drove him out of Germany.

Achieving compromise

Charles finally had little choice but to recognize Protestantism. The Religious Peace of Augsburg said that each prince in the empire could choose the official church in his own kingdom or duchy. The princes and the emperor signed this agreement in 1555. The Augsburg agreement wasn’t a move toward a stronger or more united empire; it was really quite the opposite, but it kept the confederation from falling completely apart.

However, religious war in the Holy Roman Empire wasn’t over. It would erupt again in the next century with the Thirty Years’ War (see the later section “Along Comes Calvin”).

Spreading Reform to England

During the Reformation, Church reform wasn’t limited to the Holy Roman Empire. Kings outside Germany reformed their churches, too. For example, Lutheranism spread into the Scandinavian countries, and variants took hold throughout Northern Europe. Ultimately, the Reformation didn’t create just one new church — it created many (see Chapter 10).

As in Germany, some rulers in other parts of Europe agreed with Luther’s religious convictions, while others saw the growing Reformation as a great excuse to confiscate Church wealth. The king of England was one who certainly did not agree with Luther, yet he was strong-willed and took opportunities as he found them.

Creating the Church of England

In the sixteenth century, England was primed for religious reform, although perhaps not in the same way Germany had been. Papal taxes stirred widespread resentment. The dissident priest John Wycliffe had set the stage, even winning the support of England’s royal family, with his arguments about Church abuses in the fourteenth century. Wycliffe also organized the first English translation of the Bible. Also, Desiderius Erasmus, author of the satire on Church abuses, The Praise of Folly, lived in England in the early sixteenth century. (Refer to the earlier section “Satirizing the Church” for more on Wycliffe and Erasmus.)

But after the Reformation had begun, especially when it turned violent, Erasmus rejected it. He wanted orderly reform, not revolution. Erasmus’s friend Sir Thomas More represented King Henry VIII in Parliamentary arguments against Lutheranism in 1523.

Henry VIII’s call for divorce

England’s king was vociferously anti-Luther. Henry VIII issued writings condemning the German rebel priest, and a grateful Pope Leo X rewarded Henry with the title Defender of the Faith.

Relations between Rome and London soured, however, when Henry decided that he needed to dump his wife, Catherine of Aragon, shown in Figure 14-1. Note that she was “of Aragon” and a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs whose marriage united a large chunk of Spain (see Chapter 19).

Catherine was also the aunt of Charles V, who was both Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain (as Charles I). All these circumstances gave her a certain pull with the pope.

Henry had gotten engaged to Catherine when he was only 11 and she was the widow of his elder brother, Arthur. She bore Henry five children, but only one — a daughter, Mary — survived. Henry wanted a son to be his heir.

Until Arthur died, Henry wasn’t the crown prince. He’d actually been educated to become a churchman — maybe an archbishop. So he knew a bit about religious law, and he thought he knew a lot. He decided his lack of a son was God’s punishment for having married his brother’s widow. Henry presented that as reason enough for the pope to rule that his marriage to Catherine had never been proper to begin with. Under Church rules, annulment was the only path to legal divorce.

Leo’s successor, Pope Clement VII, didn’t buy Henry’s argument for annulment. Maybe the Emperor Charles, Catherine’s nephew, carried more weight in Rome than Henry did. Or maybe Leo knew Henry’s other reason for wanting a divorce: Anne Boleyn, the king’s mistress.

© Roger Viollet/Getty Images

A frustrated monarch

Henry’s chancellor, or chief advisor, was a churchman, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey’s ambition was to become pope, so he supposedly knew his way around Church politics.

Henry gave Wolsey the specific job of getting Pope Clement to give in on the divorce question so that Henry could ditch Catherine and make Anne his queen. When Wolsey failed, the king impeached the cardinal and seized his property. Henry exiled Wolsey and then decided to execute him, but Wolsey died in 1530, before the king could get him from York to the chopping block in London.

Henry next tried to hit the pope in the pocketbook. He arranged for Parliament to pass laws cutting English fees and offerings paid to Rome. Actually, one of his advisors, a fellow called Thomas Cromwell, came up with this clever idea. If Parliament cut the payments, Cromwell told the king, Henry could pin the blame on the members.

Clement still didn’t budge, so in 1533, Henry married Anne Boleyn anyway. He had an old buddy, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, perform the ceremony. (What was Cranmer going to do? Say no to the king? You could lose your head for that.)

Catherine, having never seen The Starter Wife, lived out her days quietly in a convent and died in 1536. Clement hadn’t given permission to the king to marry again and, when the deal was done, he didn’t offer forgiveness. Paul III, who became pope in 1534, held the line and excommunicated the king of England.

Breaking ties with Rome

 Henry made a big move in 1534, telling Parliament to declare the king Supreme Head of the Church in England. With that, England broke away from Rome, like the duchies of those Protestant German princes Henry so eloquently disagreed with. But Henry still said he wasn’t siding with the Lutherans. If a Lutheran was found in England, the king dutifully ordered the heretic burned at the stake. Henry claimed that he wasn’t changing religions, just correcting the pope’s boo-boo.

He did add a few Protestant touches to the Church of England, however. For example, he had English translations of the Bible installed in the churches. It was an English church, after all.

Paying the penalty for disloyalty

The converted Henry had no more mercy for Catholics than he had for Lutherans. Never mind that he had been a Catholic until recently.

Staging (then filming) a crisis of conscience

Faith and conscience prevented Sir Thomas More from endorsing Henry VIII’s supremacy over the Church of England. To renounce the pope’s supremacy, More believed, would be wrong in the eyes of God. More wouldn’t give in to save his life.

His dramatic, tragic standoff with Henry inspired playwright Robert Bolt’s stage play A Man for All Seasons. It was adapted for a 1966 movie, starring Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, and Orson Welles, that won that year’s Academy Award for Best Picture. Another notable film adaptation is 1988’s TV movie A Man for All Seasons, directed by and starring Charlton Heston.

Disloyalty wasn’t tolerated. Anyone still loyal to Rome was beheaded or drawn and quartered. (Drawing and quartering was a gruesome form of dismemberment practiced on living individuals.) Sir Thomas More, who had helped the king attack Protestantism, became chancellor in Wolsey’s place and refused to swear obedience to the king’s church. Henry ordered More decapitated.

Only one English bishop, John Fisher of Rochester, publicly opposed the new church. Henry ordered Fisher executed, too. Is there any wonder more people didn’t speak up?

The king stirred more opposition with his next step. On the advice of More’s replacement, the crafty Thomas Cromwell, the king confiscated all the monasteries and convents.

I wouldn’t want the job as Henry’s chancellor, would you? Not after the last two received death sentences for crossing the boss. But apparently Cromwell was smart enough to hold his own. And Henry liked the way he thought.

Cromwell pointed out to Henry that he could present the confiscation of Church property as a reform measure. He could accuse those monks, friars, and nuns of not doing their jobs, and thus undeserving of the properties they controlled. What Henry really wanted were the monastery lands and treasures — centuries’ worth of offerings that pilgrims had given the monks.

Henry sold most of the monasteries, convents, and lands because he suddenly needed a lot of money. Remember that Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France were always fighting. When the two of them made peace and started acting threateningly toward England, Henry decided to boost defense spending.

Nobles bought the former abbeys and priories from the king and turned them into private estates. Now, as any tourist can tell you, they’re some of the oldest of the famous “stately homes of England.”

Making the Pilgrimage of Grace

Up in northern England, especially Yorkshire, some people came to the defense of the monks. They thought Henry VIII was taking too much power for himself, so in 1536, they marched south. Called the Pilgrimage of Grace, it must have looked more like an invasion force.

Astoundingly, Henry was able to talk these armed marchers into going home. He blamed all the problems on Cromwell. Then he ordered his guards to overtake the homeward-bound Yorkshire rebels and kill as many of them as they could in the ugliest, most conspicuous ways possible. He ordered pieces of their hacked-apart bodies set out in all the towns where the rebels had lived to serve as warnings to anyone else who might think about marching on the king.

Realizing Henry’s legacy

The Catholic Defender of the Faith had made England a capital of Protestantism, although there would be turmoil over this issue for many decades to come. And what did Henry get for it?

Well, he did get to marry Anne Boleyn, but she never gave him the son he wanted (only another daughter, who turned out to be Queen Elizabeth I). Henry had Anne beheaded and went on to four more wives, only one of whom, Jane Seymour, gave him a son, the sickly Edward VI.

Edward ruled for only a few years. As a devout Protestant, he brought some Reformation ideas into the English Church, but they were largely erased by his half-sister and successor, Mary (Catherine of Aragon’s daughter), who re-instituted Catholicism during her brief reign in the 1550s. It took Henry’s other daughter, Elizabeth — one of England’s greatest monarchs — to bring back the Church of England and make it stick. Wouldn’t her daddy have been proud?

Along Comes Calvin

Martin Luther wasn’t the last word in Church reformers. Also in the sixteenth century, a young fellow from France moved to Switzerland and shared Protestant teachings that resulted in widespread changes. His name was John Calvin.

Reforming the Swiss church

The Reformation in Switzerland started about the same time it did in Germany and in much the same way. In 1518, a priest named Huldreich Zwingli opposed the selling of indulgences.

As in Germany, fighting broke out over the reform movement. Zwingli, unlike Luther, was in the thick of the violence; he died in battle near Kappel, Switzerland, in 1531. Like the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland was a confederation of smaller states (the Swiss called them cantons). Protestantism eventually won official recognition, meaning that the rulers of the cantons were allowed to decide which brand of Christianity to follow.

Establishing Puritanism

Calvin was a brilliant Classics scholar at the University of Paris when the Reformation began. He was steeped in Greek and Roman philosophy as well as Christian theology. (Those Greeks keep popping up, don’t they?) His thinking reached back to St. Augustine’s Christian version of Platonic thought, which is built on the idea that humanity is a false and corrupt shadow of God’s perfect Idea. Like Augustine, Calvin thought people are bad and have been so ever since Adam and Eve sinned. But Calvin agreed with Luther that God is merciful. Instead of condemning everybody to Hell, God chooses to save some.

This type of thinking put Calvin at odds with his peers in France. University scholars in Paris had no patience for Reformation ideas, so Calvin left and headed for Switzerland. Before long, he was invited to teach reform theology in Geneva. His ideas became the basis of what’s calledCalvinism or Puritanism. Calvin set them down in an influential 1536 book called Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Calvin went much farther than Luther in embracing predestination. Although Calvin supported Luther’s idea that good works alone can’t win salvation, he dissented regarding the importance of faith in securing a place in heaven. Calvin thought that God decides each person’s salvation or damnation at the beginning of creation. Nothing you do or believe influences whether you’ll be saved or damned.

But predestination didn’t mean that you could do anything you wanted, according to Calvin. He taught that in order to live a godly life, you must be vigilant and strict. It isn’t to win God’s favor or reap a reward, because Calvin’s God doesn’t bargain. But if you believe, you have the opportunity and obligation to act on that belief.

Calvin’s followers had to watch for every sort of sin and be ready to cast the unworthy out of their church. Those who crossed the Reformed church could be exiled or tortured to death. Geneva, once a wide-open party town, became a place where you could be punished for singing a dirty song or even wearing clothes that were too colorful. The Puritans disapproved of feasts. They banned dancing and thought the theater sinful. They believed in hard work, thrift, and honesty. By working hard and practicing thrift, many Calvinists prospered, and some even became wealthy, which contributed to the prosperity and security of Switzerland itself. Well-heeled Puritans also shared their wealth with the Calvinist church, adding to its growth and influence.

Calvin’s ideas were so strict that more-liberal Genevans initially resisted and even threw him out of town. But Calvin returned, and by the time he died in 1564, Geneva was considered Calvin’s town, a Puritan town. His critics called him “the Pope of Geneva.”

Puritanism soon became influential in other parts of the world as well, as the following sections illustrate.

Causing turmoil in France

Because John Calvin came from France, it seems right that his teachings returned there. Ministers from Geneva spread the word, but as had happened with the Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire and in Switzerland, some French nobles broke with Catholicism for reasons that were more political than religious. They clashed with Catholic rivals. The conflict erupted into armed violence in 1562, with intermittent fighting taking the form of nine separate French Wars of Religion over the next 36 years.

The French royal family saw the French Calvinists, or Huguenots, as a threat. The Huguenots suffered severe persecution. King Henry II, who came to power in 1547, wanted to kill every Protestant in France and the Netherlands. His sons Charles IV and Henry III continued this policy. Before he became king, Henry III was among the soldiers who slaughtered 50,000 Huguenots at the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572.

It wasn’t until Henry IV gained France’s throne in 1598 that the country settled down. Henry IV had been a Calvinist, but he had to become Catholic in order to rule. He still liked the Huguenots, however, and he gave them forts from which to fend off attacks.

Sparking rebellion in Holland

Calvinism caught on in the northern Netherlands, called Holland. This development didn’t sit well with the king of Spain, Phillip II, who also ruled that country (inherited from his dad, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V).

While the southern Netherlands remained Catholic and Spanish, the Calvinist north broke free in 1608 and became the United Provinces.

The Calvinist teachings of hard work and thrift helped push the Dutch to successes in navigation and trade. They excelled as merchants and colonists through the seventeenth century.

Weakening the Holy Roman Empire

By 1618, both Protestantism and Catholicism had changed. Militant Calvinism infused the Lutheran movement. Catholicism, through a reform movement called the Counter-Reformation, had managed to reinvigorate itself.

Protestants and Catholics clashed again in the last big religious war of the Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). It broke out after the Protestants in Bohemia tried to appoint a Protestant king in place of the Catholic emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

Emperor Mathias sent forces to oppose the Bohemian Protestants. German Catholic states waded in behind the empire. Protestant states backed the Bohemians. Spain, still ruled by Hapsburg cousins of the emperor, sent soldiers to help him, and the Catholics got the upper hand.

But then in marched the Swedes on the Protestant side, commanded by King Gustavus Adolphus. The Protestants were on top until Gustavus died in battle. Then the Catholics were poised for victory — except that one more country was about to enter the war.

It was Catholic France. Did this mean the end for the Protestants? Well, not exactly. France under Louis XIII and his top government minister Cardinal Richelieu (that’s right, a high official of the Roman Catholic Church) got into this conflict on the Protestantside. Richelieu’s interest was France’s security. He mobilized against the Hapsburg family — rulers of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain — to keep them from getting too powerful. (See how “religious” this war was?)

French troops helped secure the Peace of Westphalia, ending the war in 1648. After decades of fighting, Germany was an economic wreck. Spain was bankrupt; fighting the Reformation sent it into a long decline. In retrospect, it would have been better to let the Bohemians have their Protestant king.

Puritanism in England and Scotland

As Calvinist teachings caught on in England, some people there wanted to make Puritanism part of the Church of England. This movement eventually led to the English Civil War in 1642, the execution of King Charles I, and the establishment of theProtectorate — a government of and by the Puritans (see Chapter 8).

Scotsman John Knox (1523–1572) was a Catholic priest who became a Lutheran and came under Calvin’s influence during the time that he spent in Geneva.

Knox founded the Church of Scotland in 1560. The Scottish Calvinists, called Presbyterians, organized their worship and religious authority after the Swiss model, but they faced a powerful critic in King James VI. He hated Puritanism and installed bishops in the Scottish Church. James VI became King James I of England in 1603 and thus the head of the Church of England (see Chapter 19).

Emigrating to America

 The Pilgrims who came from England to North America onboard the Mayflower, landing at Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts, in 1620, were called Separatists. They broke away from the Church of England so that they could freely observe their Calvinist beliefs. They were soon followed by somewhat less radical Puritans, who would have preferred to stay within the English church but make it more Calvinist. In New England, the two groups became virtually indistinguishable.

Considered founders of American society, these people adhered to a highly moralistic brand of Christianity — not unlike the rigorous Calvinism practiced in Geneva — and shaped social attitudes and civil policy for centuries.

New England Puritans earned notoriety for labeling certain women as witches and persecuting and killing them. This practice wasn’t exclusive to America, Puritans, or even Protestants. Catholics burned witches throughout medieval times. The judgmental strictures of Calvinism, however, tended to encourage this kind of thing. Scottish Presbyterians were also especially strident in their witch hunts.

Tracking the Centuries

1509: Desiderius Erasmus publishes his satire on Church corruption, The Praise of Folly.

October 31, 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses, a protest against Church abuses, to a church door in Wittenberg, Saxony.

1524: The Peasants’ War, a rebellion of the poor against nobles, rips through central and southwestern Germany and into Austria.

1534: On the orders of Henry VIII, the English Parliament declares the king Supreme Head of the Church in England, superceding the authority of the pope.

1536: French-Swiss religious leader John Calvin publishes his influential book Institutes of the Christian Religion, setting down the tenets of Calvinism.

1555: The Religious Peace of Augsburg grants each prince in the Holy Roman Empire the right to decide the official church affiliation of his own kingdom or duchy.

1572: The future King Henry III of France is among soldiers who slaughter 50,000 Huguenots (French Protestants) at the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.

1608: The Protestant northern region of the Netherlands (Holland) breaks free of Catholic Spanish rule and becomes the United Provinces.

1620: English Puritans arrive in Massachusetts seeking religious freedom.

1648: The Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years’ War.