there was a successful clawback as Protestantism became ever more fragmented and divisive.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the initial momentum was pretty well spent. Fissile movements, breakaways and extremism were to mark the progress of Protestantism, such as it was, in the seventeenth century. And today, 400 years on, the majority of European Christians are Catholic. Spectacle and hierarchy, both of which most of the early Protestants detested, are once again prevalent. Where Christianity is found, it often appeals to the senses rather than to the intellect. Unfortunately, from my point of view, most Europeans are probably neither Catholic nor Protestant. Western Europe is now the most secularised part of the entire world. If the natural condition of humanity is to be religious, this is not always apparent in today’s Europe.
I have tried to write about all this turbulence, both spiritual and secular, with sensitivity and sympathy. I am a Protestant, but I have tried throughout to be fair and balanced in my treatment of the Catholic Church. The Christian religion is many things. It is obviously in essence spiritual, but it also has its social, political and cultural aspects. In writing this personal survey, my main concern has been to remind people of the colossal significance of the Reformation, for me by far the most important event – or rather, movement – in European history.
And, as a Scot, I am well aware that it played a crucial role in the distinctive development of my own small but very influential nation. Calvin and, in particular, John Knox each had a great impact on the history of Scotland, and I believe it is time that we thought more about them and that we should not be content to dismiss them in negative and glib stereotyping. They both wanted people to apply their religion to all aspects of their everyday living, which in these secular times is not an easy concept to grasp. I also believe that they believed in freedom and equality as well as discipline and control. I think we owe them both a great deal.
This introduction sets out some of the principal themes of this book and is a kind of taster for some of the many episodes and events that will be described and analysed in greater detail later. Central to it all must be the towering figure of Luther, a man who started with no specific religious or political programme but who founded the most far-reaching evangelical revival our world has ever known. Some will no doubt be appalled that God has been mentioned only twice so far and Christ not at all. But they feature in the text that follows, I can assure you.
Luther wanted to return people to God. In his attempt to achieve this, he gave huge numbers of human beings the confidence to believe that their brains were as good as anyone else’s. He wanted people to read and think for themselves, to work things out with the help of the newly available Bible. In the present age, when many people are writing obituaries of the book, we should remember that Luther gave many people the special exhilaration of, for the first time, being able to handle, read and even own books. Whether his Reformation succeeded or not is a huge question, and I shall attempt an answer at the end of this book. What is certain is that Luther lit a great spiritual fire – and it is still burning today, if much less brightly.
PRELUDE
Two Kings, Two Kingdoms, One Church
CHAPTER 1
Henry VII of England
IN 1485, on a battlefield in the English Midlands, Henry Tudor, heavily outnumbered by the forces of the desperate King Richard III, managed to defeat the tyrant. Richard at least ended his dishonourable life by fighting heroically. His crown fell from his head as he was slain, and landed in a thorn bush. It was recovered and placed on the new king’s head. Thus commenced 118 years of Tudor rule. So, the story was romantic and in contrast to the essentially dour nature of Henry’s reign.
The Battle of Bosworth, in the East Midlands, lasted two hours or so and was not very bloody by the standards of the time. Only a few hundred died. The most notable of the fallen was of course King Richard III, the ‘crookback’, England’s most vilified monarch. Richard was almost certainly responsible for the murders of Henry VI and the two young princes – the sons of Edward IV – in the Tower of London. Tudor propagandists blackened his name with relish, as did Shakespeare in his melodrama Richard III. Many schoolchildren in the mid-1950s were taken to see the movie of Shakespeare’s play, in which Laurence Olivier directed himself. They were mesmerised by Olivier’s over-the-top performance as the evil king.
Shakespeare would have found it much more difficult to write a melodrama about Henry VII. He co-wrote, with John Fletcher, a play about the monstrous Henry VIII, Henry VII’s son and successor; but, understandably, he ignored Henry VII himself, who was not the stuff of drama. Henry VII was a very good king, but there was nothing flamboyant about him. In character, he was much more akin to his granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth, justly the most celebrated of all English monarchs, than to the larger-than-life and brutish figure who was his son, Henry VIII. Although Henry VII gave his kingdom the priceless benefit of stability, history has not been kind to him. This is strange, for two reasons. First, his achievements were considerable. Second, he was the subject of a celebrated biography written in a few weeks in 1621 by the philosopher, lawyer and essayist Sir Francis Bacon.
Here is Bacon’s account of the aftermath of the Battle of Bosworth:
The King immediately after the victory, as one that had been bred under a devout mother and was in his nature a great observer of religious forms, caused Te Deum to be solemnly sung in the presence of the whole army upon the place, and was himself with general applause and great cries of joy, in a kind of military election or recognition, saluted king.
Meanwhile the body of Richard after many indignities and reproaches was obscurely buried. For although the King of his nobleness gave charge to the friars of Leicester to see an honourable internment to be given to it, yet the religious people themselves (not being free of the humours of the vulgar) neglected it, wherein nevertheless they did not then incur any man’s blame or censure.
Straight away, Bacon is establishing the new king’s piety (and also the laziness of the friars of Leicester).
Henry was a very religious man. He was obsessively concerned with his life beyond death, to the extent that his will and testament requested 10,000 masses for his soul. He was exceedingly loyal to the Roman Catholic Church. He founded two new Franciscan houses. He also founded the somewhat over-the-top Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey. He was a faithful and constant pilgrim, not least to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. In all this, he was much influenced by his mother, the devotedly religious Lady Margaret Beaufort.
There is no suggestion whatsoever that Henry, in his personal religious life, in any way anticipated the turbulence that was about to sweep across Europe like some particularly wild hurricane. There was about him, in his personality and in his rule, not the merest hint of the coming Reformation. He sought, and received, papal sanction for his reign. He ignored the growing humanism that was becoming fashionable among the intellectual classes. Conscious of his shaky claim to the throne – and, in the early years of his reign, his shaky hold on the throne – he knew that it was not in his interests to alienate the very powerful Church. And so, he appeared to take the Church at face value. As he became more confident, he used it, but he did not wish to reform it. He was relaxed with the clerical establishment, not least because he deployed it to his own ends.
He had his rapacious side, and he always coveted the colossal revenues of the Church. So, his piety developed its pragmatic, even cynical, aspect. He used his patronage over episcopal appointments to choose men more notable for their administrative competence than for any spiritual zest. And he moved bishops around as if they were on a chess board – because, when a bishopric was vacant, the considerable diocesan revenues went to the crown, and an incoming bishop also had to pay dues to the king. Revenue was almost
