of unparalleled power. The process which he started in 1517 gained momentum with terrifying speed. He could not control it.
A man of stupendous energy, Luther smashed his way on to the European stage and changed everything. His detractors might say he simply smashed everything to bits, though there was much that was positive and creative in his legacy. He was, however, a diligent destroyer. He shook up a continent on which the Church was the greatest landowner, where more than 10 per cent of the population were clerics, and where the pope had political as well as spiritual power and influence.
Religious life before Luther appealed to the senses rather than the mind; the people’s year was punctuated by saints’ days and religious holidays that brought pageantry, colour and fun into otherwise bleak and grim lives. The plague was never far away. There was much fear and much warfare; life was chancy and insecure. Amid life, death was ever-present. People spent much of their time praying for the dead.
A man who somehow combined authentic humility and explosive arrogance, Luther was never the friend of peace and quiet. For the briefest of moments, he might have been dismissed as just another medieval prophet making lonely if eloquent criticisms of the corruption of the Church. But it rapidly became clear that he was special – and, as a threat to the established order across Europe, toxic.
Luther must always be the first and greatest figure of the Reformation. His crucial notion was that every individual should have the right to read and interpret the Bible for him- or herself. This, like the parallel notion of the priesthood of all believers, was an incredible idea; taken to its logical conclusion, it would have destroyed the need for any kind of Church at all: it would have made all clergy superfluous.
Whatever his faults – and there were many, not least his detestation of Jews – Luther was the supreme exponent of reform. He was in many ways the perfect revolutionary. This is one of his manifold paradoxes – for, in persona and background, he was essentially a conservative peasant, if an exceptionally clever one. A deeply spiritual man, he always spent a lot of time praying. He was also a journalist, a propagandist, a preacher, a pamphleteer, a writer of tracts and hymns and polemics, and above all a brilliant translator of the Bible. Millions of words poured from his pen in a furious torrent. As a wordsmith, Luther was both crazed and sublime. He was one of the most prodigious communicators in human history. And of course he availed himself of the crucial new invention, the printing press.
This mysterious and heroic man is desperately difficult to assess and understand even today – but it is essential to try to understand him, for he is the key to our story.
Luther was a kind of divine disrupter. After him came John Calvin, a colder man, the supreme organiser, a lawyer and theologian possessed of a rigorous mind and a controlled, lucid prose style. Towards the end of his tumultuous life, Luther became somewhat self-indulgent; but Calvin maintained the discipline that was so dear to his bleak soul, and drove himself to superhuman limits to the very end. He gave Luther’s erratic and shapeless Reformation form and order. He took a great river in spate and directed it into a more orderly channel, narrower and deeper. He created in Geneva one of the most remarkable religious communities that has ever been known. And he in turn influenced the redoubtable Scottish reformer John Knox, who was to preside over what was probably the most complete European reformation, even though it accomplished nothing like what Knox himself hoped for.
Significantly, Luther, Calvin and Knox were all born in comparative obscurity. But they shook the established order to its foundations. They took on the great and the good of their day with a zest that was genuinely revolutionary. At the same time, their attitude to secular authority was often ambivalent.
Despite the influence and effect of these momentous reformers, kings and queens and princes and popes remained important throughout the sixteenth century. Henry VII’s son Henry VIII, a duplicitous and bloodthirsty tyrant who has legitimately been compared to Stalin, nonetheless personally ushered in the English Reformation – an extraordinary process that was born not out of religious conviction but rather out of tedious matrimonial difficulties. So, in the words of Professor Andrew McGowan, the English Reformation was from the top down. The Scottish Reformation, in contrast, was against the country’s monarchy, not through it. It was from the bottom up. Having said that, it is important to remember that Scotland’s Reformation was achieved with the indispensable help of a foreign queen, Elizabeth of England.
The English Reformation was unique. At first a legal and political rather than a religious settlement, it was the creation of a wife-slaying despot. It became a very English compromise, a sort of ecclesiastical middle way.
There were no outstanding female reformers – but, because queens were just as important as kings, women have a large part to play in our story. Queen Elizabeth of England was one of the greatest monarchs of all time, and it was she who very bravely and provocatively, at the beginning of her long reign, sent her army and navy north to Scotland to secure the Scottish Reformation. Unfortunately, Mary Queen of Scots did not understand, and could not cope with, the early Scottish Reformation. She is sometimes presented as a tragic figure, though that is not the verdict of this book. A genuinely tragic figure was Lady Jane Grey, very briefly queen of England, who has a minor and pitiful role in our story. Then there was Mary of Guise, the mother of Mary Queen of Scots, who was to rule Scotland with some skill and sensitivity, and who altogether showed a grasp of Scottish politics (and to some extent religion) that proved to be quite beyond her daughter.
In the short term, it has to be admitted that the Reformation was not necessarily good for Europe’s women. Places of refuge (and of partial freedom from male control), such as the cloister and the nunnery, were often destroyed. The clergy were allowed to marry, and many women who had been or would have been nuns became subject to male domination, which was not always benign. In some ways, women were liberated; in others, they became liable to potentially brutal domestic control, with no escape. A little later, there was to be wicked and sustained persecution of so-called witches, not least in Scotland, where King James VI lent his spurious intellectual imprimatur to the craze for witch-hunts. More of these supposed witches – most of them wholly innocent old women – were killed in Europe by Catholics than by Protestants; but, in the later stages of the Reformation, there was a terrible zeal for hunting down vulnerable old women and killing them.
Then there were the popes. Some of the Renaissance popes were disgraceful figures who took venality and immorality to obscene and barely credible levels. Some of them were warriors as much as religious leaders, notably the ever-bellicose Julius II. The most hapless popes were poor Leo X and then Clement VII. The latter simply could not deal with the blustering and bullying Henry VIII, and so he must take at least some of the blame, or credit, for the English Reformation. Clement also suffered the grotesque humiliation of the Sack of Rome in 1527, when the troops of a great Catholic potentate, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, breached the inadequate defences of Rome and then subjected the eternal city to a horrific orgy of slaughter and rapine. Priests were attacked with special ferocity, nuns were raped, churches were burned and the Tiber filled up with bodies. As Pope Clement and his cardinals cowered in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the Vatican itself was used a stable for the horses of looting, feral soldiers.
Lutherans gloated at these appalling scenes (the imperial army contained many German soldiers, some of whom were Lutherans), relishing the fact that they were perpetrated by the army of a great Catholic. Clement himself was never forgiven by the people of Rome for the sack – as if it was his fault. When he died, a group of citizens got hold of his corpse, mutilated it and drove a sword through his heart.
But the papacy’s greatest problem was posed not by Henry VIII or by the savage rabble that was Charles V’s army. The real problem was Luther. The first pope who had to deal with him, Leo X, was the wrong pope at the wrong time; he simply could not understand the scope of the challenge that the German presented.
The Catholic Church took a long time to regroup and renew. But, when the organised
