was under way, it was led by a series of quite splendid popes. Two of them were fierce puritans, men of almost superhuman austerity. The contrast with the worst of the Renaissance popes could hardly have been greater. The leading figure of fightback was, however, not a pope but a minor Spanish nobleman, Saint Ignatius Loyola, a magnificent man who equalled Luther in complexity and was almost his equal in his effect on the world.
The sixteenth century was a period of devastating and momentous change in Europe. Much of this change was intellectual and spiritual; much of it was violent and physical. And much of this was driven by people who were very complex. Some them were so complex as to be incapable of a concise summing-up.
The distinguished American scholar Richard Marius wrote of William Tyndale, perhaps the greatest writer of English that the Reformation produced – and that is high praise – in terms which suggest the essentially enigmatic nature of so many of these sixteenth-century figures. Marius concluded that Tyndale seemed to have been humourless and thoroughly unpleasant, and unable to keep a friend for long. Yet Marius also noted that he was a linguistic genius, as well as brave, constant and intelligent.
In his superb biography of Saint Thomas More, Marius judged that More would never be anything but a stranger to those who study him. He was a divided man. Of course, all human beings are to some extent complex; but, in the sixteenth century, most of the great figures had contradictory and ambiguous personalities. This makes them supremely interesting but most difficult to assess. Some of them, with their modern enthusiastic proponents and zealous detractors, divide to this day. Mary Queen of Scots is an excellent example.
This book is very much about personalities – kings, queens, popes and, above all, prophetic reformers. I strongly believe in the imprint of personality on history, though many modern historians are uneasy with this approach. But I also try, in the course of this book, to deal with the many aspects of the Reformation which transcend personality. However, before we turn to these, it is important to note that men like Luther, Calvin, Knox and Loyola were not other-worldly clerics. They knew real danger; they experienced physical terror.
Luther, fleeing for his life, had to ride fifty miles by night on an unsaddled and ill-tempered horse until he at last reached safety. On another occasion, when he was outlawed and under sentence of death, he was subjected to a false ‘kidnapping’ by his protector the Elector of Saxony, who then imprisoned him, for his own safety, in Wartburg Castle. Calvin had to flee from Paris in disguise; shortly afterwards, he had to leave his native France altogether, fearing for his life. Even in Geneva, the city he came to dominate, he had his enemies. Dogs were set on him; he was shot at. John Knox, as a low-born prisoner of the French, had to endure months of degrading and dangerous toil on the French galleys in the North Sea. Ignatius Loyola, who, unlike the first three, was a genuine soldier, suffered terrible wounds when he was defending the fortified walls of the city of Pamplona against the French. A cannonball smashed into him. For many months, he was in agony, not least because the subsequent surgery was botched – not once but twice.
When we come to issues rather than personalities, the most controversial and difficult is the extent to which the Reformation was a result of venality, slackness and abuse in the old Church. It is easy enough, for example, to describe with relish the depravity of the Renaissance popes. But it is also important to record that reform was already under way within the Roman Church when Luther’s Reformation started, though the process was weak and piecemeal.
It is also important to remember that men like Luther and Calvin were products of the old Church that they rebelled against. The young monk Luther received from the Church a fine education that was to stand him in good stead as he tore into what had nurtured him. Calvin was educated in Paris through the good offices of the old Church; it helped that his father, the clerk to a bishop, had Church connections.
The intellectual ground which was to prove so fertile for the Reformation had been tilled in advance by men who were not by nature fierce reformers. Rather, they were inquiring, sceptical, even satirical. Most of them were humanists – and the greatest of these was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the illegitimate son of a priest and a washerwoman, who himself became a priest – if an unusual one. He had a highly refined mind, but he was too witty, urbane and reasonable to become the booming, bruising force that Luther was. Erasmus and others like him softened up the cerebral climate, as if preparing for Luther’s more crude and potent assault on the orthodoxies of the times.
Luther grew up in a provincial part of a Germany that was disunited (he was to render it even more disunited) but increasingly nationalistic, impatient with the influence of Rome. Many of the German clergy were disliked to the point of detestation. Rightly or wrongly, the Roman Church was regarded as anti-German and as being responsible for economic exploitation and political interference. So, Luther unleashed his revolution in a Germany that was already seething with anti-Roman sentiment. There were clearly far too many clergy, and a significant proportion of them were lazy, ignorant and depraved. One of the things that Luther managed to do was to take religion from these slack priests and hand it to the people themselves.
But, having unleashed the revolt, Luther soon showed his essentially conservative credentials when he identified with the established order during the Peasants’ War. He encouraged a brutal repression of the peasants. This was the time, more than any other, when he could not control his pen. Some of what he wrote was vile. He even told the secular princes that, in putting down the peasants’ revolt, they could gain heaven ‘more easily by bloodshed than by prayer’. This was Luther at his hellish worst, but it also indicated that here was a man with whom the German secular authorities could do business. Many of the German princes were deeply reassured by his response not just to the Peasants’ War but also to the extremely radical Anabaptists.
So, in Germany, it soon became clear that the Reformation was most likely to thrive where the secular power wanted it to. Luther himself wished to make a distinction between legitimate spiritual freedom and what he regarded as mere licence or anarchy. In much of Germany, his Reformation became the device of princes and magistrates.
In a relatively brief spell at the end of the 1530s and in the early 1540s, there was a genuine chance of long-term conciliation if not absolute consensus. It seemed for a time that, if everyone could calm down, the uproar might abate and compromise could be found. Moderates on the Catholic side – numinous men like Cardinals Reginald Pole and Gasparo Contarini – could talk freely and often agree with eminently reasonable Protestant colleagues like Martin Bucer and Philip Melanchthon. These four men continued the spirit of Erasmus in a way that their wilder leaders could not. But this ‘window of compromise’ was soon slammed shut.
When Luther died in 1546, about three-quarters of Germany was Protestant. How was this change marked? Perhaps the most obvious manifestation was that there were far fewer clergy around. And those who were around were probably married. This was a momentous change. Also, people had been encouraged to read the Bible for themselves; before, it had been, in the words of one historian, the Church’s best-kept secret. Now it had been translated by Luther into strong, vernacular German, and the printing presses had made it widely available. Partly because of this, there was a new impetus to literacy. Many monasteries and nunneries had disappeared; some had been confiscated by rapacious princes and minor landowners for their own ends; some had better fates, becoming hospitals or schools.
Norway, Sweden and Denmark were also Protestant. Then John Calvin took the Reformation to its more severe second stage, notably in Geneva, where he established what amounted to a unique theocratic republic. From there, his influence spread rapidly to his native France, to the Netherlands and, above all, to Scotland.
But, by now, the fightback, the Counter-Reformation, was well under way. The shock troops were the Jesuits; the most brutal method of recovery was through the dreaded Inquisition. At the protracted Council of Trent, in northern Italy, the Catholic Church began the tough tasks of redefining its doctrine and organising internal reform. The Reformation had made little impact in Italy
