Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World

Luther and the “fanatics” both exemplify Protestantism at work. Both were driven by dazzling religious insights, which they discovered by reading the Bible and which then taught them how to read the Bible. Both denied that any human authority could teach them they were wrong. The Christian liberty that Luther had preached reached far further than he had anticipated. That was his tragedy, and perhaps also his glory.

For while 1525 was a catastrophe, Luther did win a kind of victory. The first revolution was over. But for those princes, city councils, and people who had imbibed the reformers’ preaching, going back to the pre-1517 world was hard to imagine. So Luther found himself representing a safe middle way, the acceptable face of reform. It was an outcome that neither he nor anyone else had expected. His Reformation neither transformed the Church nor was crushed by it. Instead, a de facto partition took shape. One by one, a series of German and Scandinavian cities and territories abolished the Catholic Mass, repudiated the Church’s hierarchy, and required preachers to proclaim Luther’s doctrines. A new form of Christianity was starting to come into being. Luther’s revolution had, like all great revolutions, failed. But like all great revolutions, it had created a new world.

CHAPTER 2

Protectors and Tyrants

There is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

– ROMANS 13:1

The Reformation became notorious for two fat men. The first, Martin Luther, we have already met. The second, King Henry VIII of England, was in most things Luther’s opposite. Yet the two men shared a titanic stubbornness, near-messianic self-belief, a knack for dividing Christendom into admirers and enemies, and a lifelong mutual hatred.

Henry VIII was not, except in his own eyes, a great spiritual leader. And yet while the Reformation began as Luther’s story, it quickly became Henry’s. Protestantism started in believers’ souls, as a love affair with God, but it could not be kept tidily in its place. It spilled out into every part of life, and in particular, as we will see throughout this book, it collided with politics, stymied and hijacked by it, but also subverting and occasionally transforming it. Like mating spiders, religious reformers and political leaders needed and exploited each other, but they could never trust each other. To the politicians, Luther’s movement was both a threat to be negotiated and an opportunity to be seized. At the same time, it was either the work of divine providence or a fearful scheme of Satan’s. For politicians are human beings. They felt the tug of Luther’s teachings and of the Church’s warnings on their souls like everybody else.

Taming the Reformation

The intertwined alliance-rivalry between Church and state had been a constant theme of medieval politics. The two sides were like an old married couple, with plenty of accumulated grievances but held together by powerful bonds of affection, loyalty, convenience and habit. Still, even placid marriages can be disrupted when an eye-catching interloper waltzes in.

For the reformers, breaking up this cosy twosome was a necessity. They knew that the pope’s power depended on the cooperation of secular rulers: the kings, princes, and magistrates who actually governed Europe. In this sense, the Reformation was fundamentally a struggle for the backing of secular governments. Without their support, no religious dissidents could last for long. With it, the old Church was at their mercy.

This was a matter of principle as well as of self-preservation. The Church’s hierarchy, Luther insisted, was illegitimate. It dominated and exploited when it should, Christlike, serve and submit. Priests, bishops, and popes should be mere functionaries, chosen by the Christian community to provide them with religious services. But then who should govern the Church? The Anabaptists’ spiritual anarchy was not to Luther’s taste. Long-standing Christian tradition taught that secular rulers, from the Holy Roman Emperor down, had been granted their authority by God. The New Testament taught that Christians should obey such secular rulers as a matter of conscience. What’s more, Europe’s rulers were all baptized Christians, and Luther argued that all baptized Christians were the spiritual equal of any pope. Surely, because God has given princes power over secular matters, it would be natural for them to assume responsibility for religious affairs too.¹

In 1520, Luther appealed to Germany’s princes to take religious reform into their own hands. They did not do so – yet. Most preferred to wait and see what would happen, although some encouraged reformist preaching in their territories. Even after the disaster of the Peasants’ War, there was no agreement as to what should actually be done. Worse, a terrifying Turkish invasion, which conquered most of Hungary in 1526 and would reach the walls of Vienna in 1529, meant that this was no time for intra-Christian quarrels. So when the princes of the Holy Roman Empire gathered at the Diet of Speyer in 1526, they unanimously agreed to postpone the problem. Until a proper council of the Church (a much-hoped-for mirage) could resolve the religious questions, each prince should “so live, govern and carry himself” in his religious policy “as he hopes and trusts to answer to God and his Imperial Majesty”.² Almost by accident, this anodyne resolution created space for something that had never happened before. One by one, territories and cities began to peel away from the universal Church. In the lead was Luther’s own Saxony. Luther published a German order of service for Saxony in 1526, and the new church structure that coalesced there was widely imitated.

The breathing space created at Speyer was brief, but it was enough. In 1529, another Diet of Speyer overwhelmingly passed a resolution rescinding the implicit permissions granted three years earlier, horrified at how they had been used. Overwhelmingly but, this time, not unanimously. Five princes made a formal “Protestation” against the new decree. They, their allies, and their spiritual descendants down to the present became known as Protestants.

Between them, those first Protestants encapsulate the tensions of political Reformation. There is no doubting the real religious conviction behind their stand. Elector Frederick of Saxony, who had protected Luther but never been persuaded by him, had died in 1525. His brother and successor, John, was a true believer. So was George, from 1527 the margrave of Brandenburg, who had been converted by Luther’s courage at the Diet of Worms. Philip, landgrave of Hesse, had also met Luther at Worms, when he was only sixteen. By 1525, when he had commanded the troops who massacred the peasants at Frankenhausen, he was fully in the reformers’ camp. All of these men knew the risk they were taking. Three days after the Protestation, Saxony, Hesse, and three leading Protestant cities – Strassburg, Nuremberg and Ulm – signed a secret defensive pact.³

The risk the princes were taking was matched by the potential rewards. They had already begun to assume full control of the churches in their territories. Even during the Peasants’ War itself, Philip of Hesse was drawing up an inventory of the property owned by monasteries in his lands. After all, Luther’s theology made monasteries redundant and emphasized the rights of secular princes. Surely those hard-pressed and impoverished princes should be able to take over the monasteries’ ill-gotten wealth, to use in God’s service as they saw fit? Once the example was set, it proved too tempting to resist. There was safety in numbers. Each territory that jumped made it easier for the next one. It turned out that the Germans’ modest and conscientious reforms were only a starting point for more rapacious regimes to come.

Outside the Holy Roman Empire, political Reformations first took root in two sets of territories that were in effect safe from outside interference: the ferociously independent cantons of Switzerland, and the lands around the Baltic Sea. We will return to Switzerland’s distinctive, republican Reformations in the next chapter. The Baltic story was, at first, simply an extension of Germany’s. The grand master of the Teutonic Knights, a religious-military order that controlled territories in what is now Poland, was advised by Luther in 1523 that he could abandon his celibacy and turn his lands into a secular principality. He liked the prospect, and so in 1525 made himself duke of Prussia and his subjects into Lutherans. The wife he chose came from another northern early-adopter territory: the powerful kingdom of Denmark, which extended south into Germany and included modern Norway, and by the 1530s was caught in a civil war between two claimants to the throne. One of them allied himself with the reformers, and when he emerged as King Christian III in 1536, he led his whole kingdom out of the Catholic Church. For the next century, Denmark would remain the single most substantial Lutheran state.

Sweden’s case was more idiosyncratic. After more than a century under Danish rule, Sweden had broken free in the early 1520s. The rebel leader turned king, Gustav Vasa, had no intention of ceding an inch of his new sovereignty to anyone. So when German merchants in his ports began buzzing with tales of princes to the south sloughing off papal authority, his interest was piqued. The Reformation that he slowly imposed on a reluctant Sweden was clearly influenced by Luther and implemented by churchmen and ministers who were true Lutheran believers, but it was Gustav Vasa’s Reformation, not Luther’s. Its distinctive features were his seizure of huge amounts of church property and his iron insistence that the Swedish church’s hierarchy and courts be under royal control.

Even Gustav Vasa, however, looks tame compared with the Reformation era’s most megalomaniacal opportunist. Henry VIII was not a natural Lutheran. His greatest talent was political display, an invaluable skill for the ruler of a kingdom whose fading grandeur was not matched by much real power. His piety was as theatrical as the rest of his persona – which is not to doubt its sincerity: no better way to persuade others than to persuade yourself first. So when Luther’s movement erupted, Henry threw himself into the fray with characteristic panache.

Like the Renaissance scholar he fancied himself to be, Henry wrote a book. Despite his ghostwriters’ efforts, I Assert That There Are Seven Sacraments is no great piece of theology; but celebrity sells, and it became one of the few anti-Luther pamphlets to be a commercial success in Germany. Whether anyone was persuaded by Henry’s argument, we may doubt. But in two quarters, at least, it struck home. For one, Luther could not ignore such a high-profile challenger. He wrote a vitriolic reply, much to the fury of the English king, who only liked polemical rough-and-tumble on his own terms. More important, however, Henry’s book found its mark in Rome. He had long resented the pope’s gift of glorious titles to the kings of Spain (“the Catholic King”) and France (“the Most Christian King”), while England was left out. Now, finally and after some negotiation, Henry got his prize and became “Defender of the Faith.”

So Henry’s initial response to the Reformation was to remain ostentatiously Catholic and thereby to extort favours from Rome. Other Catholic kings were also discovering that the pope now needed them more than they needed him. But for Henry VIII, this turned out not to be enough. He ran up against one of the pope’s few undisputed powers: canon law, which included the law of marriage. In 1527, fretted by his lack of sons and entranced by a young noblewoman named Anne Boleyn, Henry convinced himself that his long-standing marriage to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon was invalid. Only the pope could grant the annulment Henry suddenly, desperately wanted. Yet Henry’s case in law was flimsy, and the pope was loath to offend Queen Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V. Henry tried every diplomatic trick in the book, but Rome would not cooperate.

In another generation, that drama would have resolved itself some other way. But the precedent set by the German princes, and the arguments made by some opportunistic English readers of Luther, raised an enticing possibility. What if the pope did not, in fact, have the right to judge an English king’s marriage? What if God intended that the king himself should be head of the church in his own realm? If German princelings could get away with it, then why not the king of England, the Defender of the Faith? The idea grew on Henry until it had him absolutely in its grip. By the time he formally repudiated the pope’s authority in 1534, his marital adventures had almost become a side issue. He was now convinced that he was, by God’s appointment, Supreme Head of the Church of England.⁴

Lutherans might have swallowed that self-important title. They could not, however, accept what Henry did with it, which went beyond what any other prince of the age attempted and would not be surpassed until the French revolutionaries tried to impose the newly invented Cult of the Supreme Being. It was not merely that Henry took control of the church’s courts and senior appointments. Nor that he seized its property, although the scale of the plunder was staggering; something like a third of the land area of England passed into royal control when the monasteries were dissolved. German princes usually simply closed the monasteries to new entrants and allowed them to wind down gradually, but Henry shut them down. Monks who cooperated were pensioned off. Those who resisted might or might not escape with their lives. He promised to use the proceeds on pious projects. Instead, he spent most of them on futile wars, such that, despite this vast influx of cash, by the end of his life he was facing bankruptcy.

Money and jurisdiction, however, were only the beginning. Henry earnestly believed he was Supreme Head of the church, and woe to those who defied him. Few did, but those few included some monumental figures. Erasmus’s friend Thomas More and the famed bishop and theologian John Fisher were both beheaded in 1535. It was the public-relations equivalent of decapitating a pair of Nobel Prize winners, and won Henry a Europe-wide reputation as a tyrant, only underlined by the killing of his second wife the following year. More and Fisher died for their loyalty to Rome, but in 1536 the leading English Protestant theologian, William Tyndale, was burned alive with Henry’s approval and connivance, for daring to disapprove of the king’s remarriage. That pattern, of parallel judicial murders of Catholics and Protestants, would persist to the end of Henry’s reign.

The English church’s new orthodoxy, in other words, was defined by its king’s whim. Luther, appalled, claimed “that king wants to be God”. Henry did not quite put it that way, but he did believe God had delegated a great deal of spiritual authority to him. He toyed with the idea that he could ordain priests. He certainly thought that he could tell his bishops what to believe, debating with them and browbeating them into submission. His own extensive notes on doctrinal reform include such choice snippets as his attempt to rewrite the Ten Commandments. The biblical text forbids coveting others’ property, but Henry wanted it only to forbid coveting “wrongly or unjustly”. Usually he was persuaded to pull back from the more outrageous positions, but his own fickle, inconsistent theological prejudices were at the root of his entire Reformation. He loathed the pope and eagerly promoted the English Bible. He also loathed Luther’s doctrine of salvation and was extravagantly devoted to the Catholic Mass. It did not really make sense, but who was going to tell him that?⁵

When he died in 1547, England began to return to religious coherence. The regency regime of the new boy king, Edward VI, was controlled by a Protestant clique who had prudently kept their convictions muted while the old tyrant lived. Even so, Henry’s legacy was pervasive. The principle of state control over religion was firmly established. England’s religion changed with its monarchs. After Edward’s death, a Catholic queen, his half-sister Mary, returned the kingdom briefly to Rome, and after her death England obediently followed a Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, back into schism again.

Elizabeth was subtler than Henry VIII, and in any case, with orthodoxies hardening across Europe, the time for theological swashbuckling was over. Yet while she presided over an unmistakably Protestant church, her own prejudices could still override religious logic. She had a taste for trappings of traditional religion like vestments, choirs, and crucifixes, whether or not they were compatible with her new church’s doctrines. Her Protestantism in medieval dress left her subjects split between ceremonialists who treasured those echoes of the old ways and “Puritans” who wanted to complete the journey to the new. Her idiosyncrasies are not exactly to blame for the Civil War that engulfed England forty years after her death, but they helped make it possible.

Henry VIII’s legacy to England was a state church in the fullest sense. British monarchs and prime ministers continued to choose the Church of England’s bishops until 2007. Parliament defined its liturgy, structures, and even doctrines deep into the twentieth century. The Church of England has never quite been a puppet of the state, but it has certainly been kept on a short leash. Its liturgy purrs with approval of royal and state power and is filled with obsequious prayers for the Crown, without a whisper of acknowledgment that sometimes governments do bad things. It even stretched its Protestant principles so far as to anoint one king, the beheaded Charles I, as a saint. Yet when the Church of England has needed help from the state, such as when it was desperately trying to set up workable structures in colonial North America, the state has felt free to block it at every turn. For three centuries, the church did not dare even to question this arrangement. Since then, some of its leaders have wondered whether they should stay in this unequal marriage, but they have never yet walked away. The Church of England even now clings to its subordinate but privileged place in British public life, readier to celebrate than to challenge state power. Henry VIII would have been proud.

The Two Kingdoms

Few other Protestant churches were so easily tamed, but they all faced the same dilemmas. How far should they submit to a ruler who was, or claimed to be, on their side? And how far should they resist a ruler who was not?

Luther’s first instinct was to caution against any thought of rebellion, even against the “anti-Christian regime” of the papacy. In a tract written in 1521, he argued that it is always the innocent who end up suffering in rebellions and that politics is none of ordinary people’s business. They could humbly petition their princes, but they could not take matters into their own hands. Who were they to think that they could tear down Antichrist’s kingdom by themselves? Only God could do that. If they truly had faith, they would wait.⁶

This reflected Luther’s own political context. Saxony was not a law-governed bureaucratic territory. Its prince, the elector, was the beginning and the end of government. Any alternative such as the “rule of law” meant handing power to corrupt local noblemen. Luther disliked law both theologically and politically. As one scholar puts it, he had “more confidence in one enlightened prince than in battalions of lawyers”. In a sermon in 1528, he told his audience,

You aren’t the one who ought to establish justice and punish injustice. When some wrong is done in my house, and my next door neighbour wants to break into my house and do justice there, what should I say to that?

Better to be still and wait on the Lord.⁷

Carte blanche for rulers, then? Not quite. In 1523, Luther published a longer book bluntly titled Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed. His starting point was that princes themselves are no better than plunderers:

They can do no more than strip and fleece, heap tax upon tax. . . . Since the beginning of the world a wise prince is a mighty rare bird, and an upright prince even rarer. They are generally the biggest fools or the worst scoundrels on earth.

That does not, however, detract from their authority. Rulers only rule with God’s permission. The reason princes are so dreadful is that “the world is too wicked, and does not deserve to have many wise and upright princes”. Indeed, the only reason God has established princes and governments at all is that human beings are sinners. “If the world were composed of real Christians, that is, true believers, there would be no need for or benefits from prince, king, lord, sword or law.”

That might seem like a banal enough observation, but Luther’s theology gives it immediate and practical importance. For him, all believers are “real Christians” of this kind, or rather, that is what they are in God’s eyes, even if they are still outwardly mired in sin. In other words, Christians live simultaneously in two worlds. As redeemed and regenerate believers, they live for God and do not need laws to live by any more than trees need laws to tell them how to grow. But as sinners, subject to human frailty, they both need and deserve the smack of firm discipline.

This is Luther’s theory of the “two kingdoms”, the foundation of Protestant political theory. There is an earthly kingdom: the kingdom of secular politics, a place of law, justice, and punishment. Its purpose is to restrain human evil so that some semblance of peace and order is possible in this world. That is a limited aim but not an ignoble one. God has ordained this kingdom, and Christians can serve it, whether as princes, lawyers, or executioners. But existing alongside it, and far more important than it, is the kingdom of heaven, whose only king is Christ. Here there is no law, and no coercion, because all true Christians are one another’s willing servants. And this is where Christians’ hearts should be set, not on the lumpen business of human politics. It is an idea that has echoed through the centuries.

Plainly, however, it does not answer the question posed by Luther’s title. Whenever two kingdoms exist side by side, there are boundary disputes. Where does the line fall? Luther had some partial answers. He argued that princes could regulate practical features of church life such as finance, property, and governance, but could not trespass onto matters of faith or doctrine. He did not spell out how to deal with issues which straddle that line. He did at least tackle some of the obvious hard cases. Could princes punish heresy? No, because errors should be corrected by loving admonition from ministers, not by persecution. Could they ban books? No. He suggested that if they tried, a Christian should reply,

Gracious sir, I owe you obedience in body and property; command me within the limits of your authority on earth, and I will obey. But if you command me to believe or to get rid of certain books, I will not obey; for then you are a tyrant and overreach yourself.

Luther even argued that if a prince orders his people to fight in an unjust war, it is their duty to disobey him. Importantly, though, such resistance should always be passive. You should refuse an unjust order and then submit peacefully to punishment for that refusal. It is a bold theory, but not a practical one.⁸

Luther managed to maintain this position for the rest of his life. He happily accepted various princes’ patronage and support. Yet he could still bite, or at least bark at, the hands that fed him. When princes enriched themselves with Church property, he called them robbers. When a small Thuringian town tried to expel its pastor in 1543, Luther vigorously protested on two-kingdoms grounds: “You have not instituted the office, but God’s Son alone has done so. . . . Keep to your own office and leave God’s rule to him.”⁹ When he learned about the defensive pact that the Protestant princes and cities had agreed to in 1529, he angrily accused them of faithlessness for trusting in human aid rather than in God.

Yet pacts were made, and larger cities were not so easy to boss around. In practice, princes disliked laying down their powers at the gates of Christ’s kingdom. Luther’s Renaissance-minded colleague Philip Melanchthon took a more pragmatic view. If princes were called to punish sin in this world, surely that included punishing sin in the Church? So, surely, they had a right – indeed, a duty – forcibly to reform a corrupt church in their territory, by, for example, expelling clergy who would not renounce the pope and imposing a new, Lutheran order of service? Indeed, is this not actually a prince’s most important calling and responsibility?

Luther was forced to concede the point. Plainly, during the current crisis, with the Church confined in its popish dungeon, no one but a prince could set it free. But he insisted that this was a temporary expedient. Once settled churches were established, princes must relinquish their hold. Likewise, he admitted that the princes should suppress Anabaptists and other “fanatics”. However, he denied that this was religious persecution. It was simply the suppression of rebellion or the punishment of blasphemy, which was legitimate, he argued tendentiously, because openly defying God was a denial of natural justice.

His princely allies could live with the requirement that at some unspecified point in the future they would have to step back from their hands-on role in church life. Only slowly did they begin to argue that that time might never come. The duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg declared that he would always have an obligation to protect and oversee his church, like the kings of ancient Israel. Inexorably, this became Lutheranism’s entrenched orthodoxy. In 1555, German princes were granted legal authority to determine their subjects’ religion.¹⁰

It was not too bad a deal for the reformers. Their princely allies might be overbearing, but they were sincere enough. Indeed, because they were now claiming that God had called them to reform their churches, they had to be seen to be doing so in good earnest. Still, the preachers needed the princes more than the princes needed the preachers, and both sides knew it.

A notorious crisis in 1539–40 showed just how badly wrong this could go. Philip, landgrave of Hesse, was one of the most powerful Lutheran princes. He was also a walking scandal. He had made a political marriage at the age of eighteen and had disliked his wife from the first – not that it stopped him from fathering ten children by her. His unabashed adultery was embarrassing, but he was tempted by a more radical solution: bigamy, like the Old Testament patriarchs. In this new religious world, when old rules were up for renegotiation in the name of Christian liberty, why not? The theologians disapproved, but not unreservedly. Luther had once publicly teased his wife with the prospect of polygamy, and Melanchthon had at one point suggested bigamy as a solution to King Henry VIII’s marital crisis. In 1539, a brush with illness and the appearance of a suitable young lady crystallized Philip’s determination. He gave Luther and Melanchthon a blunt ultimatum: if they did not support him, he would seek the pope’s blessing instead.

They gave in. Of course they did. How could they not? Finding a sliver of theological justification, in December 1539 they reluctantly advised that a fresh marriage could proceed. They insisted that the whole affair be concealed, because “this act was not defensible before the world and the imperial laws”. Keeping such an explosive secret would probably always have been impossible, but in the event Philip scarcely tried. To Luther’s horror, in March 1540 he openly celebrated his new marriage, and the whole rotten scandal burst open. It permanently damaged Philip, although he stayed with his new wife for the rest of his life (they had nine children). It also permanently stained Luther’s reputation. It did not help that instead of repenting, Luther merely grouched that the secret should never have come out. Asked about the matter by a visitor, he reportedly said, “Bigamy has well-known examples in the Scriptures and could have been kept secret. . . . Just be calm! It will blow over. Perhaps she will soon die.”¹¹

The point is not merely that Luther gave way under intolerable pressure but that his political theology had led him into a trap. He was too ready to believe in a benevolent prince, and he had mixed for that prince a cocktail of God-given authority and Christian liberty that would have proved heady for anyone, let alone an old goat like Philip. Innocence had been lost and would not easily be regained.

Chaos and Order

Other branches of the sundered Protestant family found other solutions. The “Anabaptists” and other radicals separated Luther’s two kingdoms much more sharply. Agreeing with Luther’s view that the secular state was little more than organized banditry, they concluded that Christians should therefore have nothing to do with it. They should obey its orders but not swear its blasphemous oaths, serve on juries that hang the hungry for stealing bread, or fight in armies that plunder the innocent. Perhaps they should not even pay taxes that funded such things. All they should do is live their lives in peaceful separation and prepare for the persecution that these rejections would inevitably bring down on their heads. The most enduring strand of Anabaptism was marked by pacifist withdrawal from a corrupt world, making Christ’s kingdom visible in the godly communities they formed.