A Political and Social History of Modern Europe Part 15

Mary Stuart, during her brief stay in Scotland (1561-1567), tried in vain to stem the tide. The jealous barons would brook no increase of royal authority. The austere Knox hounded the girl-queen in public sermons and fairly flayed her character. The queen's downfall and subsequent long imprisonment in England finally decided the ecclesiastical future of Scotland. Except in a few fastnesses in the northern highlands, where Catholicism survived among the clansmen, the whole country was committed to Calvinism.

[Sidenote: Calvinism in England]

Calvinism was not without influence in England. Introduced towards the close of the reign of Henry VIII, it gave rise to a number of small sects which troubled the king's Anglican Church almost as much as did the Roman Catholics. Under Edward VI (1547-1553), it considerably influenced the theology of the Anglican Church itself, but the moderate policies of Elizabeth (1558-1603) tended to fix an inseparable gulf between Anglicans and Calvinists. Thenceforth, Calvinism lived in England, in the forms of Presbyterianism, Independency, [Footnote: Among the "Independents" were the Baptists, a sect related not so immediately to Calvinism as to the radical Anabaptists of Germany. See above, pp. 134 f., 145, footnotes] and Puritanism, as the religion largely of the commercial middle cla.s.s. It was treated with contempt, and even persecuted, by Anglicans, especially by the monarchs of the Stuart family. After a complete but temporary triumph under Cromwell, in the seventeenth century, it was at length legally tolerated in England after the settlement of 1689. It was from England that New England received the Calvinistic religion which dominated colonial forefathers of many present-day Americans.

ANGLICANISM

Anglicanism is the name frequently applied to that form of Protestantism which stamped the state church in England in the sixteenth century and which is now represented by the Episcopal Church in the United States as well as by the established Church of England.

The Methodist churches are comparatively late off-shoots of Anglicanism.

The separation of England from the papacy was a more gradual and halting process than were the contemporary revolutions on the Continent; and the new Anglicanism was correspondingly more conservative than Lutheranism or Calvinism.

[Sidenote: English Catholicism in 1500]

[Sidenote: Church of England]

At the opening of the sixteenth century, the word "Catholic" meant the same in England as in every other country of western or central Europe --belief in the seven sacraments, the sacrifice of the Ma.s.s, and the veneration of saints; acceptance of papal supremacy and support of monasticism and of other inst.i.tutions and practices of the medieval Church. During several centuries it had been customary in legal doc.u.ments to refer to the Catholic Church in England as the _Ecclesia Anglicana_, or Anglican Church, just as the popes in their letters repeatedly referred to the "Gallican Church," the "Spanish Church," the "Neapolitan Church," or the "Hungarian Church." But such phraseology did not imply a separation of any one national church from the common Catholic communion, and for nearly a thousand years--ever since there had been an _Ecclesia Anglicana_--the English had recognized the bishop of Rome as the center of Catholic unity. In the course of the sixteenth century, however, the great majority of Englishmen changed their conception of the _Ecclesia Anglicana_, so that to them it continued to exist as the Church of England, but henceforth on a strictly national basis, in communion neither with the pope nor with the Orthodox Church of the East nor with the Lutherans or Calvinists, abandoning several doctrines that had been universally held in earlier times and subst.i.tuting in their place beliefs and customs which were distinctively Protestant. This new conception of the Anglican Church-- resulting from the revolution in the sixteenth century--is what we mean by Anglicanism as a form of Protestantism. It took shape in the eventful years between 1520 and 1570.

[Sidenote: Religious Opposition to the Roman Catholic Church in England]

In order to understand how this religious and ecclesiastical revolution was effected in England, we must appreciate the various elements distrustful of the Catholic Church in that country about the year 1525.

In the first place, the Lutheran teachings were infiltrating into the country. As early as 1521 a small group at Cambridge had become interested in the new German theology, and thence the sect spread to Oxford, London, and other intellectual centers. It found its early converts chiefly among the lower clergy and the merchants of the large towns, but for several years it was not numerous.

In the second place, there was the same feeling in England as we have already noted throughout all Europe that the clergy needed reform in morals and in manners. This view was shared not only by the comparatively insignificant group of heretical Lutherans, but likewise by a large proportion of the leading men who accounted themselves orthodox members of the Catholic Church. The well-educated humanists were especially eloquent in preaching reform. The writings of Erasmus had great vogue in England. John Colet (1467?-1519), a famous dean of St. Paul's cathedral in London, was a keen reformer who disapproved of auricular confession and of the celibacy of the clergy. Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), one of the greatest minds of the century, thought the monks were lazy and indolent, and the whole body of churchmen in need of an intellectual betterment. But neither Colet nor More had any intention of breaking away from the Roman Church. To them, and to many like them, reform could be secured best within the traditional ecclesiastical body.

[Sidenote: Political Opposition to the Roman Catholic Church in England]

A third source of distrust of the Church was a purely political feeling against the papacy. As we have already seen, the English king and English parliament on several earlier occasions had sought to restrict the temporal and political jurisdiction of the pope in England, but each restriction had been imposed for political reasons and even then had represented the will of the monarch rather than that of the nation.

In fact, the most striking limitations of the pope's political jurisdiction in the kingdom had been enacted during the early stages of the Hundred Years' War, when the papacy was under French influence, and had served, therefore, indirectly as political weapons against the French king. Before that war was over, the operation of the statutes had been relaxed, and for a century or more prior to 1525 little was heard of even a political feeling against the bishop of Rome.

Nevertheless an evolution in English government was in progress at that very time, which was bound sooner or later to create friction with the Holy See. On one hand, a sense of nationalism and of patriotism had been steadily growing in England, and it was at variance with the older cosmopolitan idea of Catholicism. On the other hand, a great increase of royal power had appeared in the fifteenth century, notably after the accession of the Tudor family in 1485. Henry VII (1485-1509) had subordinated to the crown both the n.o.bility and the parliament, and the patriotic support of the middle cla.s.s he had secured. And when his son, Henry VIII (1509-1547), came to the throne, the only serious obstacle which appeared to be left in the way of royal absolutism was the privileged independence of the Catholic Church.

[Sidenote: Early Loyalty of Henry VIII to the Roman Catholic Church]

Yet a number of years pa.s.sed before Henry VIII laid violent hands upon the Church. In the meanwhile, he proved himself a devoted Roman Catholic. He scented the new Lutheran heresy and sought speedily to exterminate it. He even wrote in 1521 with his own royal pen a bitter arraignment of the new theology, and sent his book, which he called _The Defence of the Seven Sacraments_, with a delightful dedicatory epistle to the pope. For his prompt piety and filial orthodoxy, he received from the bishop of Rome the proud t.i.tle of _Fidei Defensor_, or Defender of the Faith, a t.i.tle which he jealously bore until his death, and which his successors, the sovereigns of Great Britain, with like humor have continued to bear ever since. He seemed not even to question the pope's political claims.

He allied himself on several occasions with Leo X in the great game of European politics. His chief minister and adviser in England for many years was Thomas Wolsey, the most conspicuous ecclesiastic in his kingdom and a cardinal of the Roman Church.

[Sidenote: The Marriage Difficulty of Henry VIII]

Under these circ.u.mstances it is difficult to see how the Anglican Church would have immediately broken away from Catholic unity had it not been for the peculiar marital troubles of Henry VIII. The king had been married eighteen years to Catherine of Aragon, and had been presented by her with six children (of whom only one daughter, the Princess Mary, had survived), when one day he informed her that they had been living all those years in mortal sin and that their union was not true marriage. The queen could hardly be expected to agree with such a definition, and there ensued a legal suit between the royal pair.

To Henry VIII the matter was really quite simple. Henry was tired of Catherine and wanted to get rid of her; he believed the queen could bear him no more children and yet he ardently desired a male heir; rumor reported that the susceptible king had recently been smitten by the brilliant black eyes of a certain Anne Boleyn, a maid-in-waiting at the court. The purpose of Henry was obvious; so was the means, he thought. For it had occurred to him that Catherine was his elder brother's widow, and, therefore, had no right, by church law, to marry him. To be sure, a papal dispensation had been obtained from Pope Julius II authorizing the marriage, but why not now obtain a revocation of that dispensation from the reigning Pope Clement VII? Thus the marriage with Catherine could be declared null and void, and Henry would be a bachelor, thirty-six years of age, free to wed some princess, or haply Anne Boleyn.

[Sidenote: Difficult Position of the Pope]

There was no doubt that Clement VII would like to do a favor for his great English champion, but two difficulties at once presented themselves. It would be a most dangerous precedent for the pope to reverse the decision of one of his predecessors. Worse still, the Emperor Charles V, the nephew of Queen Catherine, took up cudgels in his aunt's behalf and threatened Clement with dire penalties if he nullified the marriage. The pope complained truthfully that he was between the anvil and the hammer. There was little for him to do except to temporize and to delay decision as long as possible.

The protracted delay was very irritating to the impulsive English king, who was now really in love with Anne Boleyn. Gradually Henry's former effusive loyalty to the Roman See gave way to a settled conviction of the tyranny of the papal power, and there rushed to his mind the recollection of efforts of earlier English rulers to restrict that power. A few salutary enactments against the Church might compel a favorable decision from the pope.

Henry VIII seriously opened his campaign against the Roman Church in 1531, when he frightened the English clergy into paying a fine of over half a million dollars for violating an obsolete statute that had forbidden reception of papal legates without royal sanction, and in the same year he forced the clergy to recognize himself as supreme head of the Church "as far as that is permitted by the law of Christ." His subservient Parliament then empowered him to stop the payment of annates and to appoint the bishops without recourse to the papacy.

Without waiting longer for the papal decision, he had Cranmer, one of his own creatures, whom he had just named archbishop of Canterbury, declare his marriage with Catherine null and void and his union with Anne Boleyn canonical and legal. Pope Clement VII thereupon handed down his long-delayed decision favorable to Queen Catherine, and excommunicated Henry VIII for adultery.

[Sidenote: Separation of England from the Roman Catholic Church: the Act of Supremacy]

The formal breach between England and Rome occurred in 1534. Parliament pa.s.sed a series of laws, one of which declared the king to be the "only supreme head in earth of the Church of England," and others cut off all communication with the pope and inflicted the penalty of treason upon any one who should deny the king's ecclesiastical supremacy.

One step in the transition of the Church of England had now been taken.

For centuries its members had recognized the pope as their ecclesiastical head; henceforth they were to own the ecclesiastical headship of their king. From the former Catholic standpoint, this might be schism but it was not necessarily heresy. Yet Henry VIII encountered considerable opposition from the higher clergy, from the monks, and from many intellectual leaders, as well as from large numbers of the lower cla.s.ses. A popular uprising--the Pilgrimage of Grace--was sternly suppressed, and such men as the brilliant Sir Thomas More and John Fisher, the aged and saintly bishop of Rochester, were beheaded because they retained their former belief in papal supremacy. Tudor despotism triumphed.

[Sidenote: The "Six Articles"]

The breach with Rome naturally encouraged the Lutherans and other heretics to think that England was on the point of becoming Protestant, but nothing was further from the king's mind. The a.s.sailant of Luther remained at least partially consistent. And the Six Articles (1539) reaffirmed the chief points in Catholic doctrine and practice and visited dissenters with horrible punishment. While separating England from the papacy, Henry was firmly resolved to maintain every other tenet of the Catholic faith as he had received it. His middle-of-the- road policy was enforced with much bloodshed. On one side, the Catholic who denied the royal supremacy was beheaded; on the other, the Protestant who denied transubstantiation was burned! It has been estimated that during the reign of Henry VIII the number of capital condemnations for politico-religious offenses ran into the thousands-- an inquisition that in terror and bloodshed is comparable to that of Spain.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the Monasteries]

It was likewise during the reign of Henry VIII that one of the most important of all earlier Christian inst.i.tutions--monasticism--came to an end in England. There were certainly grave abuses and scandals in some of the monasteries which dotted the country, and a good deal of popular sentiment had been aroused against the inst.i.tution. Then, too the monks had generally opposed the royal pretensions to religious control and remained loyal to the pope. But the deciding factor in the suppression of the monasteries was undoubtedly economic. Henry, always in need of funds on account of his extravagances, appropriated part of the confiscated property for the benefit of the crown, and the rest he astutely distributed as gigantic bribes to the upper cla.s.ses of the laity. The n.o.bles who accepted the ecclesiastical wealth were thereby committed to the new anti-papal religious settlement in England.

[Sidenote: Protestantizing the Church of England: Edward VI]

The Church of England, separated from the papacy under Henry VIII, became Protestant under Edward VI (1547-1553). The young king's guardian tolerated all manner of reforming propaganda, and Calvinists as well as Lutherans preached their doctrines freely. Official articles of religion, which were drawn up for the Anglican Church, showed unmistakably Protestant influence. The Latin service books of the Catholic Church were translated into English, under Cranmer's auspices, and the edition of the _Book of Common Prayer_, published in 1552, made clear that the Eucharist was no longer to be regarded as a propitiatory sacrifice: the names "Holy Communion" and "Lord's Supper"

were subst.i.tuted for "Ma.s.s," while the word "altar" was replaced by "table." The old places of Catholic worship were changed to suit a new order: altars and images were taken down, the former service books destroyed, and stained-gla.s.s windows broken. Several peasant uprisings signified that the nation was not completely united upon a policy of religious change, but the reformers had their way, and Protestantism advanced.

[Sidenote: Temporary Roman Catholic Revival under Mary Tudor]

A temporary setback to the progress of the new Anglicanism was afforded by the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-1558), the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, and a devout Roman Catholic. She reinstated the bishops who had refused to take the oath of royal supremacy and punished those who had taken it. She prevailed upon Parliament to repeal the ecclesiastical legislation of both her father's and her brother's reigns and to reconcile England once more with the bishop of Rome. A papal legate, in the person of Cardinal Reginald Pole, sailed up the Thames with his cross gleaming from the prow of his barge, and in full Parliament administered the absolution which freed the kingdom from the guilt under Mary incurred by its schism and heresy. As an additional support to her policy of restoring the Catholic Church in England, Queen Mary married her cousin, Philip II of Spain, the great champion of Catholicism upon the Continent.

But events proved that despite outward appearances even the reign of Mary registered an advance of Protestantism. The new doctrines were zealously propagated by an ever-growing number of itinerant exhorters.

The Spanish alliance was disastrous to English fortunes abroad and distasteful to all patriotic Englishmen at home. And finally, the violent means which the queen took to stamp out heresy gave her the unenviable surname of "b.l.o.o.d.y" and reacted in the end in behalf of the views for which the victims sacrificed their lives. During her reign nearly three hundred reformers perished, many of them, including Archbishop Cranmer, by fire. The work of the queen was in vain. No heir was born to Philip and Mary, and the crown, therefore, pa.s.sed to Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, a Protestant not so much from conviction as from circ.u.mstance.

[Sidenote: Definite Fashioning of Anglicanism: the Reign of Elizabeth]

It was in the reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603) that the Church of England a.s.sumed definitely the doctrines and practices which we now connect with the word "Anglicanism." By act of Parliament, the English Church was again separated from the papacy, and placed under royal authority, Elizabeth a.s.suming the t.i.tle of "supreme governor." The worship of the state church was to be in conformity with a slightly altered version of Cranmer's _Book of Common Prayer_. A uniform doctrine was likewise imposed by Parliament in the form of the _Thirty-nine Articles_, which set a distinctively Protestant mark upon the Anglican Church in its appeal to the Scriptures as the sole rule of faith, its insistence on justification by faith alone, its repudiation of the sacrifice of the Ma.s.s, and its definition of the Church. All the bishops who had been appointed under Mary, with one exception, refused to accept the changes, and were therefore deposed and imprisoned, but new bishops, Elizabeth's own appointees, were consecrated and the "succession of bishops" thereby maintained. Outwardly, the Church of England appeared to retain a corporate continuity throughout the sixteenth century; inwardly, a great revolution had changed it from Catholic to Protestant.

Harsh laws sought to oblige all Englishmen to conform to Elizabeth's religious settlement. Liberty of public worship was denied to any dissenter from Anglicanism. To be a "papist" or "hear Ma.s.s"--which were construed as the same thing--was punishable by death as high treason. A special ecclesiastical court--the Court of High Commission--was established under royal authority to search out heresy and to enforce uniformity; it served throughout Elizabeth's reign as a kind of Protestant Inquisition.

[Sidenote: English Dissent from Anglicanism]

While the large majority of the English nation gradually conformed to the official Anglican Church, a considerable number refused their allegiance. On one hand were the Roman Catholics, who still maintained the doctrine of papal supremacy and were usually derisively styled papists, and on the other hand were various Calvinistic sects, such as Presbyterians or Independents or Quakers, who went by the name of "Dissenters" or "Non-conformists." In the course of time, the number of Roman Catholics tended to diminish, largely because, for political reasons which have been indicated in the preceding chapter, Protestantism in England became almost synonymous with English patriotism. But despite drastic laws and dreadful persecutions, Roman Catholicism survived in England among a conspicuous group of people. On the other hand, the Calvinists tended somewhat to increase their numbers so that in the seventeenth century they were able to precipitate a great political and ecclesiastical conflict with Anglicanism.

THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION

We have now traced the origins of the Protestant Revolt against the Catholic Church, and have seen how, between 1520 and 1570, three major varieties of new theology--Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism-- appeared on the scene and divided among themselves the nations of northern Europe. The story of how, during that critical half-century, the other civilized nations retained their loyalty to the Catholic Church virtually as it had existed throughout the middle ages, remains to be told. The preservation of the papal monarchy and Catholic doctrine in southern Europe was due alike to religious and to political circ.u.mstances.

It must not be supposed that pious critics of ecclesiastical abuses were confined to countries which subsequently became Protestant. There were many sincere Catholics in Italy, Austria, France, and Spain who complained of the scandals and worldliness that afflicted the Church at the opening of the sixteenth century: they demanded sweeping reforms in discipline and a return of the clergy to a simple apostolic life. They believed, however, that whatever change was desirable could best be achieved by means of a reformation within the Catholic Church--that is, without disturbing the unity of its organization or denying the validity of its dogmas--while the critics of northern Europe, as we have seen, preferred to put their reforms into practice by means of a revolution--an out-and-out break with century-old traditions of Catholic Christianity. Even in northern Europe some of the foremost scholars of that period desired an intellectual reformation within Catholicism rather than a dogmatic rebellion against it: with Luther's defiance of papal authority, the great Erasmus had small sympathy, and Sir Thomas More, the eminent English humanist, sacrificed his life for his belief in the divine sanction of the papal power.

Thus, while the religious energy of northern Europe went into Protestantism of various kinds, that of southern Europe fashioned a reformation of the Catholic system. And this Catholic reformation, on its religious side, was brought to a successful issue by means of the improved conditions in the papal court, the labors of a great church council, and the activity of new monastic orders. A few words must be said about each one of these religious elements in the Catholic reformation.