Reformation

C

The Netherlands

The Netherlands was composed of 17 provinces of largely self-governing and independent counties and duchies that were part of the Holy Roman Empire. They had their own institutions and separate assemblies that had only gradually evolved a separate assembly for delegates from each province, or States-General, of the Netherlands. Each province owed separate allegiance to its overlord, the emperor Charles V, and only in 1548 did he persuade the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire to allow him to form the Netherlands dominions into a separate government from the Empire. Only at this moment did the Netherlands become consolidated into a state and that reality only lasted for a generation since the impact of Protestantism in the Netherlands was to split the state into two separate entities.

A federation of northern (Protestant) provinces eventually came together in January 1579 at Utrecht to agree an act of alliance (Union of Utrecht), which became known as the United Provinces. In the 17th century, when they finally renounced all allegiance to Charles V’s successors, they were known as the Dutch Republic. The provinces of the southern Netherlands retained their allegiance to Charles V’s successors, Philip II of Spain and his heirs, and also their Catholicism. They were generally known in this period as the Spanish Netherlands.

Such a division was not an inevitable consequence of the growth of Protestantism, whose initial impact in the Low Countries had been broadly based, and especially among its literate, urban elites. Despite the existence of an ecclesiastical Inquisition, supported by the emperor’s political representatives in the Netherlands, the early adherents to Protestantism exploited the legal particularism that was a feature of the Low Countries. The political division of the Netherlands was determined by the politics and warfare of the later 16th century. An initial, widespread revolt against Spanish overlordship in 1566 was accompanied by Calvinist preaching and organized iconoclasm, but it failed in its objectives and led to Spanish military occupation. A further invasion by land and sea in 1572 led to a prolonged military conflict in which the Netherlands became the cockpit of Europe’s international tensions. The resulting northern Netherlands provided a showcase state for the Protestant Reformation in the 17th century. But it was one where, at least by the early decades of the 17th century, few of the population were communicating members of the Dutch Reformed Church. And, at the famous Synod of Dort (Dordrecht) in 1618 to 1619, a simmering dispute over the doctrines of predestination raised by the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius led to an important fissure in Europe’s Reformed Protestant Churches.

D

Scotland

Scotland was an old kingdom whose institutions and customs were in the process of being brought up to date in the 16th century. Such a process created resentments and these were particularly evident in the early support for Protestantism in which the merchants and governing elites of Lowland Scotland, in conjunction with a minority of Highland lairds, were particularly active. In its early phases, the Scottish Reformation was under Lutheran influence but it was finally successfully accomplished under the leadership of the religious reformer, John Knox, a disciple of Calvin who had spent several years in Geneva. In 1560 Knox persuaded the Scottish parliament to adopt a confession of faith and discipline reflecting those in use in Geneva. The Scottish parliament later created the Scottish Presbyterian Church and established its governance by local kirk (church) sessions and by a general assembly representing the local churches of the entire country. Mary, Queen of Scots (Mary Stuart), ruler of the kingdom following her return from France in 1561, had her eyes fixed on acquiring the English throne. She only irregularly attempted to restore Scotland to the old religion and was ejected from the throne seven years later. In the years following her exile, Protestantism became secure in most of Scotland although some Highland clans and areas remained Catholic and its Presbyterian system of government continued to be a subject of controversy into the 17th century.

E

England

The English Reformation was a more complex affair that reflected a kingdom that was highly unitary but, despite Tudor claims to the contrary, not an absolute monarchy. Its Reformation therefore combined elements of a princely Reformation from above with a more popular Reformation from below. The pressures for and against the Reformation were played out against the background of the roulette of the Tudor dynastic succession.

The princely Reformation was most evident in the early stages of the English Reformation. It began as a narrow legal dispute between royal and papal authority provoked by the decision of Henry VIII in 1527 to seek an annulment for his marriage to Catherine of Aragón. The king had become convinced that, by marrying the widow of his brother, the marriage contravened the law of the Church. In reality, he wished to free himself to marry Anne Boleyn and secure a legitimate heir to the throne. Two elements stood immovably, however, in his way. His first marriage had been legitimized by a papal bull eliminating precisely those obstacles that he now claimed to render it unlawful. Secondly, Rome had just been overrun by the troops of the emperor, Charles V, Catherine of Aragón’s nephew, and the pope was in no position to negotiate.

The king consulted widely among Europe’s theologians, including the major Protestant reformers. He garnered support from among the English bishops too, before, in 1533, marrying Anne Boleyn. Two months later he required the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, to pronounce his divorce from Catherine. Henry VIII was promptly excommunicated but he retaliated by invoking the English parliament. The Act of Supremacy (1534) appointed the king and his successors as supreme head of the Church of England. Other statutes ended the pope’s legislative and fiscal authority in the kingdom. Between 1536 and 1540 the monasteries were suppressed and their property seized by the king. The king clearly wished to adhere to the established doctrines of the old faith and secured from Parliament in 1539 the Act of Six Articles, which made it heretical to deny the faith of the traditional Church. But there were reform-minded individuals at his court, who included the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, as well as the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who sought more radical doctrinal change and they enjoyed some support in the country at large, especially in the south-east.

Under the minority of Edward VI, the nation’s rulers turned more resolutely towards Protestantism. England became the refuge for several leading European reformers and the successive Books of Common Prayer (1549 and 1552) reflected a Protestantism of a Zwinglian/South German nature. Priests were allowed to marry (1549) and it looked as though, despite the vociferous opposition to the new dispensation from the south-west (evident in the rising of 1549), the Reformation had come to stay. Edward’s untimely death in June 1553 showed how tentative were the foundations of English Protestantism. His successor, Mary Tudor, had remained faithful to the traditional religion of her youth and her father, and sought to reverse all these reforming measures. She enjoyed the support of a majority of the English bishops and, by not attempting to re-appropriate monastic lands from their new lay owners, she avoided confronting those who had a stake in the new order. Many Protestants sought prudent exile abroad; those that remained risked prosecution and the stake. But the five years of her reign were not sufficient to turn the clock back and, when she died in November 1558, the only heir to the throne was her sister, Elizabeth I, the daughter of Anne Boleyn and the unofficial champion of the reformers.

The early years of Elizabeth’s reign determined the nature of the English Church from then until the eve of the English Civil War. The Act of Supremacy and Uniformity (1559) and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) created a Protestant Church in which bishops, Church courts, and a good deal of the ritual of observance of the traditional Church was retained. It was a settlement that, despite the continued existence of a Catholic minority in the kingdom, provided a stable environment for laying the foundations for a solid Protestant consciousness over the next couple of generations. By 1600 England would be the most populous, and ecclesiastically best-endowed Protestant state in Europe. But the return of the exiles under Mary’s reign was only one of a number of stimuli to the growth of a vociferous and well-organized body of opinion in later Elizabethan England that sought the further reformation of the English Church. The puritans, as they would be known to their critics, did not succeed in changing the formal constitution of the Anglican Church but they did have a powerful role to play in the implantation of a certain brand of Protestant awareness in England under the early Stuarts.

F

Eastern Europe

The Protestant Reformation in Eastern Europe followed a different rhythm from that in the West. It largely occurred later and thus was often derivative in its doctrinal aspects. It was less dependent on the power of the printing press and more dependent on graduates who were often trained in the Protestant universities to the west. In regions where monarchies were often elective and state structures were in the hands of the aristocracy, it was the magnates who determined the course of the Reformation. Their personal contacts, and the impact of private correspondence and manuscript treatises upon their confessional allegiance, had a considerable part to play in the development of a Protestantism that was often quite widespread but not always very deep-rooted in the multi-ethnic populations among whom religion tended to develop an ethnic specificity. Only in the Transylvanian region of Hungary did the Protestants ever succeed in having one of their adherents in a position of overall political authority.

In Danubian lands, the Reformation was overshadowed by the military threat from the Turks. Defeating the incursions of the latter led the Habsurg-dominated politics around the Danube inevitably towards compromise with their local nobilities, including granting them rights of private worship in whatever religion they chose. In Bohemia, the Reformation was assisted by the existence of Hussite traditions among the Bohemian Brethren and also by the support it gained from the German-speaking populations of northern and north-western Bohemia. The Czech Church fell gradually under Protestant influence. In Hungary, the young king (Louis Jagiello) was killed by the Turks at the Battle of Mohács and with him over three-quarters of the Hungarian army were either wounded or perished as well. This destabilized east-central Europe for a century thereafter and provided many opportunities for the Turks to assert their hegemony in the region. But for a minority of Magyar nobles, their education at Protestant universities in the west taught them to interweave their humanist culture with their religious convictions and link them both to a distinctive Magyar linguistic and historical identity. This was reinforced by the translations of Protestant Bibles and other texts into Magyar so that, by the early 17th century, Magyar Calvinism had established its own Geneva at Debrecen, the centre of one of the more lively Calvinist reformations in Europe.

The vast kingdom of Poland was undergoing considerable growth and transformation at the time of the Protestant reformation. Its monarchy was in the last stages of becoming an elective monarchy, a commonwealth in which the szlachta (Polish, “nobility”) were the dominant influence. As Protestantism penetrated the nobility from the 1550s onward it readily gained a foothold in the Polish Commonwealth. But, on the same grounds, Poland became a haven for religious dissent of all kinds. And this dissent also existed within Polish Protestant communities at a more local level, taking on the colour of local ethnic and religious tensions in the process. Although there were times when the supporters of Reformed Protestantism came close to claiming a majority in the sjem (Polish, “diet”), the Polish Protestant Reformation was divided. The weakened authority of the Polish Crown paradoxically led many Polish nobles to want to preserve its adherence to the Catholic Church all the more. Polish Protestantism was defeated from within.

V

The Radical Reformation

By 1555 the Reformation was already a movement of divergent and sometimes contradictory manifestations and reactions. Historians have created subsidiary designations to try to capture this diversity. We have already encountered some of these typologies. One of those most commonly in use now is that of the radical Reformation. It is used to distinguish between the anabaptists and related dissenters and the magisterial Reformation of the Protestant magistri (Latin, “theologians”). The term implies that these movements were more fundamental in their theology as well as political and socially more radical. These dissident groups emerged in the early years of the Reformation. They were often defined mainly by their exclusion from the mainstream. There were schwärmer (German, “enthusiasts”) who experienced the full force of evangelic reform. Luther made a great deal of the Zwickau prophets, a small group of men and women who took to preaching and prophesying in a town not far from Luther’s Wittenberg in the early 1520s. But it was in Zürich in 1523 to 1524 that both the term and the initial adherents of what we now know as anabaptism took root. In reality, those classified as radical reformers often had little in common, although many of them would eventually follow the Zürich faithful who broke with Christendom through repudiating baptism in infancy (and hence the term anabaptist). Their insistence on a believer being re-baptized into the true faith created a sectarian aura that was reinforced in other aspects of the movement too. In some cases they turned their backs on established learning and social values, espousing simplicity in dress and lifestyle and sometimes a degree of communal living. Coalescing and reconstituting themselves in different groups (Familists, Melchiorites, Mennonites, Schwenckfeldians, Socinians, and so on), and under different leaders in the course of the 16th century, the radical Reformation managed to survive despite sustained persecution and hostility, some of which was intensified in the wake of the anabaptist takeover of the city of Münster in 1534.