movement that Luther started in northern Germany in 1517. There were many separate reformations. The term ‘Counter-Reformation’ is used in this book to describe the impressive Catholic fightback, which, while belated, was able to take advantage of the growing division in Protestant ranks. Some historians prefer the term ‘Catholic Reformation’.
The Key Players
John Calvin
Less impetuous, less exhilarating than Luther, but possessed of an orderly, lucid lawyer’s mind and a strong, stern will, he masterminded the second phase of the movement that Luther so explosively began. He will always be associated with Geneva (to this day, his imprint is very clear on the old town up the hill from the lake). He was initially reluctant to undertake his ministry there, and was at times immensely unpopular with some of the citizens. But, despite appalling ill-health, he prevailed, and he created in the city state an impressive, if also repressive, democratic theocracy.
History has not been particularly generous to him; he is remembered more for the grimness of aspects of his theology and for his persistent emphasis on social discipline than for his decency and even warmth as a pastor. His teachings and his sermons are full of wisdom and sensible guidance on how to live; he was a kinder and more humane man, and far less of a fanatic, than his many detractors would have us believe, though he undoubtedly had his fierce side. Knox admired him enormously but was not greatly influenced by him.
Calvin always pined for his native France, from which he fled as a young man and to which he never managed to return.
Catherine de Medici
A scheming and duplicitous Florentine, she exercised in various roles – queen, queen mother, regent – a powerful but malign influence over the affairs of France in the latter part of the sixteenth century. A complex figure, she did at times try to pursue religious moderation and toleration, but her main drive was her dynastic ambition, and she could never resist political intrigue. She was certainly not good news for France, or for Protestantism.
She was deeply implicated in the protracted atrocity of the Massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572, during which many thousands of French Huguenots – French Protestants – were slaughtered in especially vile circumstances. Despite this, commemorative medals of celebration were struck in Rome.
William Cecil
Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister. A curious mixture of boldness and caution, he lay low during the bloody reign of Mary Tudor. One of Elizabeth’s first significant acts as queen was to appoint him as her principal adviser, and he rapidly embarked on an ambitious and daring pro-Protestant foreign policy.
It was Cecil who advised Elizabeth to send her army and navy north to drive the French out of Scotland. The final decision was Elizabeth’s and hers alone, but it was Cecil who persuaded her, despite the many inherent risks, that it was the right thing to do.
Later, he consistently argued for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots; here, Elizabeth took much longer to heed his sage advice.
Emperor Charles V
The last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned by the pope, he was elected emperor in 1519. His enemies were numerous and powerful – Suleiman the Magnificent, the French, the Protestants and occasionally even the papacy. He won a huge victory over the considerable Protestant forces of Germany at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547, but typically was unable to follow it up. His imperial legacy was to be the growing disunity of Christendom. Recognising this, he resigned in 1556 and split his huge territories between his two sons, the ineffective Philip of Spain and Ferdinand, who became the new emperor.
An earnest and decent man, Charles could not always control his own troops, who were sometimes little more than a feral rabble. The nadir of his imperial rule came in 1527 when his army, unpaid, leaderless and mutinous, sacked Rome in an extended and appalling orgy of rape, looting, vandalism and murder as Pope Clement VII cowered in the Castel Sant’ Angelo.
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer
Cautious, diplomatic, adaptable, he was the supreme liturgist of the careful compromise that was the Anglican Reformation settlement. Unfortunately, he was executed by ‘Bloody Mary’ Tudor, and so he did not live to see the fruits of his life’s work in the Anglican Church which Elizabeth rapidly established when she became queen a few years later.
A countryman at heart, he was also a notable secular statesman. His crowning achievement was the beautiful Anglican Book of Common Prayer. His mastery of English prose, and his contribution to English cultural as well as religious identity, were second only to Tyndale’s.
Queen Elizabeth I of England
Wayward, vulgar, deceitful, secretive, vain, flighty, bossy, spiteful and chronically indecisive, she was frequently insufferable. One of her ministers described her as a base bastard pissing kitchen woman. She never married and was often lonely, her loneliness accentuated by her office. She was also ferociously intelligent, witty, kind, exceptionally well informed and, above all, courageous. She reigned long and well. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed by her father, the monstrous Henry VIII; and generally she did not like executing people, though she knew that she had to from time to time.
In the second year of her reign, when she was just 26, she bravely decided, after long agonising, to defy the great powers of France and Spain and send her army and navy north to help the Scots drive the French out of their country and thus secure the Scottish Reformation. This was the most important decision of her reign and probably the most important decision in Scottish history. It finally ended centuries of hostility and led to centuries of peace.
She was the supreme star in a century of glittering European monarchs, and her allure is somehow still alive to this day.
Henry VII of England
The founder of the Tudor dynasty, he was a cautious and notably pious king who slowly but surely restored peace to England, which had been ravaged for generations by the civil Wars of the Roses. Although he won his crown in battle, he was a peace-loving man, and he believed in using marriage as a means to diplomatic and political ends. Thus he, a Lancastrian, married Elizabeth of York, merging the white and red roses into a kind of peaceful pink; he married his heir Arthur to Catherine of Aragon in an attempt to secure a long-standing peace with Spain, and he married his daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland, a visionary piece of dynastic manoeuvring that eventually, several generations later, led to the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland.
He was an exemplary Roman Catholic and a successful king. He is the subject of the best biography in the English language, by Sir Francis Bacon; but unfortunately his thuggish younger son, who became Henry VIII, is more remembered and more celebrated.
Henry VIII of England
A wicked and duplicitous psychopath, he presided over the English Reformation, which was initially driven not by spiritual aspirations but rather by the king’s complicated and tedious matrimonial difficulties. He married six times and executed two of his wives. He treated them all abominably, with the possible exception of the last, the estimable Catherine Parr.
He surrounded himself with some of the most gifted Englishmen of all time, including the four Thomases: the precocious lawyer Thomas Cromwell, who drafted much of the far-sighted legislation that enacted the early English Reformation; Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, his first great servant; Sir Thomas More, his Lord Chancellor and the eloquent conscience of early Catholic resistance to Henry’s Reformation; and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, a liturgist of exceptional brilliance.
Cromwell and More
