CONVICTION AND CONFORMITY
‘Either the Reformed religion is good or it is bad; there is no middle . . . there is as little in common between the Reformed teaching and Roman fantasies as there is between white and black.’ That view of a Dutch Calvinist, published in 1579, is replicated from different sides of the emerging religious frontier in western Christianity. The English Jesuit John Radford thought that Protestantism and Catholicism were ‘as farre as heaven and hell asunder’. These divisions were often presented as part of the cosmic struggle between Christ and Antichrist, God and the Devil. Only a half-hearted hesitant, said the London cleric William Gouge, could fail to ‘shew a holy zeale in our anger’. These were clerical opinions and, in the second half of the sixteenth century, churchmen took the lead in fashioning religious convictions into an instrument for reinforcing ecclesiastical authority and imposing confessional uniformity. But their views found an echo among the laity. In 1615, the Calvinist minister of the Dutch village of Wassenaar was called before the synod by his own flock, who complained that he preached ‘without rebuking the Papacy or other sects’. Officials in the diocese of Ulm noted that villagers knew the issues at stake in polemic controversy but they could not recite the Ten Commandments or the Lord’s Prayer. The growing body of Catholic and Protestant martyrologies and the burgeoning narratives of personal conversion stories were deployed for polemical purposes, but they emerged from the experience of people confronted with uncomfortable religious choices in the Post-Reformation.
Religious identities were manifested in ritual and liturgy. These acted as markers for disputed doctrines, the finer points of which many lay people may not have understood. But it required no great learning to comprehend that devotions to the Virgin Mary and to saints were about some people being holy and having power to intercede with God. Equally, the laity’s taking of communion in both kinds, the wine with the wafer or bread, was readily perceived as a symbol of the priesthood of all believers. But whether the communion came in the form of a wafer or a piece of bread, whether one received it standing up or sitting down, where the communion table was placed, whether children were exorcised and, if so, how many times they were sprinkled with water, and whether the priest wore vestments or not – these distinctions became contentious, acquiring an importance that is impossible to understand without taking into account the significance of religious conformity.
The possibility had opened up from the earliest days of the Protestant Reformation in Wittenberg that there were ceremonies and rituals which might not be specifically forbidden or commanded by God. These might remain ‘things indifferent’ (adiaphora). Accepting that there were religious matters over which one could agree to disagree was at the heart of a bitter debate. In the wake of the Interim of Augsburg (the imperial decree of 1548 and first step towards the legalization of Lutheranism in the empire) in Germany, the argument split strict (Gnesio-) Lutherans from ‘Philippists’ (the supporters of Philipp Melanchthon), the latter seeking accommodation with the emperor to arrive at a civil peace. The dispute emerged again in the Puritan controversies with Elizabethan bishops in England in the later sixteenth century. The problem was that to admit that there were ‘things indifferent’ opened the door to individual choice. Religious conformity became more important as the risks of dissent grew greater. Identical beliefs and practices, practised everywhere in the same way and at the same time, constituted an aspiration to a unity which had never existed hitherto in Christendom. As the religious frontiers grew more menacing, so it mattered more to belong within a community whose uniformity matched an enhanced sense of spiritual unity.
Conformity was hard-wired into post-Reformation society. It ensured, for example, that, although we must suppose there were as many homosexual men and women as in any age, their voices are rarely heard, so universal was the ambient social and moral pressure and so repressive the legislation against those found guilty of homosexual acts. Religious conformity generally meant sharing the views of those in the congregational pew next to you. But there were many for whom it signified something larger. The English Puritan William Bradshaw, for example, felt more at home with Calvinists abroad than he did with the conforming members of the Church Established who were his neighbours. With globalizing Catholic Christianity in mind, a Spanish ambassador to Switzerland told co-religionists there in the early years of the Thirty Years War that ‘they should feel a closer kinship to a Catholic Indian or African than to a heretical . . . countryman’.
For most people conformity meant doing what everyone else did in their immediate neighbourhood, which was to attend the local church, whose bells represented the dominant lived experience of religion: a call to attend church, or to signal a burial, a marriage or a public anniversary. The local church intersected with local civic life. It organized elementary schooling and distributed poor relief. Orders of local manorial courts were read out at the pulpit, and official bulletins were pinned up in the porch. Not to attend church raised a question mark over whether one belonged in the community. To be excluded from receiving communion through excommunication was a mark of shame. To tolerate excommunicates – and, by extension, nonconformists – was to invite God’s wrath. Correspondingly, when catastrophe hit local society, the most readily available explanation was that the community had collectively sinned and must assuage God’s anger. When fire destroyed the English city of Dorchester in 1613 it became act one of its spiritual conversion into a Puritan stronghold in pre-Civil War England. The pressures for conformity were generated within localities, and they probably grew greater as social cohesion became more threatened, demographic resilience weakened and weather patterns turned more unstable.
Yet the reality of religious division in the later sixteenth century was that the emerging frontiers ran down the main street of communities, and not simply between states and political entities. Managing the resulting tensions depended on the size and organizational ability of the religious minority concerned, the diplomatic skills of local community leaders and their ability to reach an accord with one another, and the existence or not of outside pressures, including from individuals with interests in stirring things up. In retrospect, we can see where and when flashpoints occurred. Processions, feast-days and funerals were moments when public space was occupied exclusively by one religion, and when people were in physical proximity. Venerated objects – the images of saints, relics, Eucharistic wafers – went on public display. Those who did not take part were targeted. The French libertine poet Théophile de Viau recalled an occasion when he and a fellow-Protestant found themselves in the Catholic town of Agen in 1618. A priest, wearing his vestments and carrying the Viaticum, passed them on his way to a dying parishioner to perform the last rites, preceded by an acolyte ringing a bell. Passers-by fell to their knees, hats doffed, while de Viau and his friend just stood back. Their irreverence attracted the fury of the crowd, and it was only the intervention of the magistrate which saved their lives.
What happened in Agen was part of living with religious division in what was left of Christendom. Such incidents remained localized and sporadic in most cases because people’s commitment to their religious beliefs was trumped by their other commitments: not to transgress the law, to behave charitably towards their neighbours and to accept the judgement of their betters. People who were divided by religion retained much of what they shared in common. The Polish Jesuit Piotr Skarga acknowledged as much when he wrote of Polish Protestants: ‘heresy is bad, but they are good neighbours and brethren, to whom we are linked by bonds of love in the common fatherland’. A community at odds with itself was as evil as a civil war in a Christian commonwealth. In the wake of the first French civil war, when Protestants captured the city of Lyon and damaged its ecclesiastical fabric, the magistrates insisted that the well-bred children of the town parade, two by two and hand-in-hand, Protestants with Catholics, to attend King Charles IX at his visit in 1564. Dressed identically, the members of both faiths offered the king the town’s loyalty. Only the small jewelled crosses pinned to the caps of the Catholics distinguished them from the Protestants. That was part of the communal mechanisms of repair when localities were torn apart by violence in the name of religion. The Christian commonwealths of the later sixteenth century depended on them.
LIVING TOGETHER APART IN SWISS AND GERMAN LANDS
The earliest experiments in living with religious diversity occurred in Switzerland and Germany. Two major alternatives existed, and there were attempts at both. The first consisted in negotiating shared space, including (in some places) church buildings and resources – known in the sixteenth century as a simultaneum (from simul, at the same time). The second involved a segmentation of the communities in question, such that they each had their own space, which typically corresponded to the religion of the ruler. The latter pattern was incarnated for German lands by the Peace of Augsburg (1555), in which the dominant principle was that the religious configuration of geographical space followed the religious inclination of its rulers – known by the Latin phrase, first coined in 1586, as cuius regio, eius religio.
Most of Switzerland implicitly divided up along the lines of the second option. Different cantons decided their confessional affiliations, leaving those who were in the minority confession to choose whether to stay and conform, or to leave and live elsewhere. But, in the area which had briefly witnessed the first ‘religious wars’ in sixteenth-century Christendom, the first and second Kappel wars (1529–31), there was an experiment in sharing space. In the disputed lands of the Thurgau on the borders of the Zürich canton, the 1531 treaty which ended the conflict created arrangements in which Catholic and Reformed congregations shared churches. Catholic priests baptized and married Reformed members of the congregation indiscriminately. Abbots carried out visitations of Reformed clergymen. The bishop’s chancery in Constance appointed Reformed Protestants to serve as pastors. Local people were given the right to choose collectively and individually the faith to which they wished to adhere.
The Thurgau breaks the notion of the sixteenth century as an age of religious wars; yet, through to the early seventeenth century the arrangements worked. By the terms (Landfrieden) of the 1531 treaty, each party was guaranteed privileges – interpreted by the Catholics as the continuing existence of parish priests, boundaries and the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishop of Constance. Protestants had the right to continue worshipping in their faith. Both sides accepted that local communities determined what happened on the basis of majority votes. Articles of the treaty guaranteed that individuals who remained Catholic could practise their ceremonies in private or in public, ‘without attack or hatred’ – the clause which formed the basis for the sharing of churches for religious worship. Finally arrangements were put in place for the division of church property in proportion to the numbers in each faith. That it worked was the result of a stalemate in the balance of religious forces. But people also adapted it to their perceptions of what was right and proper.
In German lands, the experiment in religious pluralism was on a grander scale, set in place by the Peace of Augsburg. The jurists who determined its details found it hard to accommodate religious pluralism within the territorial diversity of the Holy Roman Empire. Although the agreement was ‘perpetual’ and its terms took precedence over other laws and privileges, it applied only to Catholics and Lutherans who subscribed to the Augsburg Confession. Zwinglians, Calvinists and Anabaptists were excluded. Princes and imperial knights were given the right to determine the religion in their territories, while those subjects who did not wish to comply were accorded the right to emigrate (ius emigrandi). Ecclesiastical jurisdictions over the domains of those rulers who chose to become Protestant were suspended. Imperial cities with both confessions present within their territories at the time of the Peace of Passau in 1552 were to be bi-confessional. The most delicate issue was what should happen in the ecclesiastical territories. In the face of concerted Protestant opposition, the ‘ecclesiastical reservation’ clause (reservatum ecclesiasticum) declared that, when a princely prelate became Lutheran, he should forfeit his bishopric. To appease Protestant princely sensibilities, King Ferdinand issued a declaration (Declaratio Ferdinandea) which guaranteed freedom of conscience for Protestant nobles and cities within such ecclesiastical territories. That declaration was never part of the Peace of Augsburg, although Protestants later regarded it as such. Above all, the guarantors of the peace were those who had the greatest stake in the construction of a viable framework for preserving the integrity of the Reich: the Estates of the empire, its officials and jurists, and the emperor.
The history of the empire in the later sixteenth century is the working out of the Peace of Augsburg as part of the consolidation of its polity. It is a success story in the face of continuing Lutheran expansion, a gathering Catholic counter-offensive, and the problem of those excluded from its terms. Despite the pressures for religious conformity, German princes and their officials understood that the empire could work only with a measure of religious pluralism, and that religious restraint and flexibility were necessary in the name of preserving the common peace. That attitude came easily to Ferdinand, proclaimed Emperor Ferdinand I in 1558. He had brokered the agreement and, deprived of Habsburg ancestral lands with the exception of the Erblande (the Österreichische Erblande, or hereditary lands in Austria), Bohemia and Hungary, he was the ruler of a composite monarchy whose core dominions were insufficient to resource it. He was dependent on the German Estates to defend a 530-mile-long vulnerable eastern frontier, open to attack from the Turks. In a militarized zone over 40 miles deep, it required over 20,000 soldiers to garrison the fortifications that kept border incursions to a minimum. By his death in 1564, Ferdinand’s debts topped 10 million florins, the equivalent of five years of annual revenues. The cost of servicing this debt consumed three quarters of the latter, while the garrisons on the eastern frontier needed 1 million florins a year, which was about what he owed his soldiers when he died.
The situation was more delicate for his successor, Maximilian II. Brought up with an enduring bitterness towards Charles V, who had tried to exclude him from the German succession in 1551, he made common cause with German, especially Lutheran, princes whenever the opportunity arose. He was elected to the Bohemian crown in 1562 and the Hungarian one a year later, and his court became a magnet for those who were unwilling to be shoehorned into a confessional way of thinking. His court preacher, Johann Sebastian Pfauser, was a crypto-Protestant. His librarian, Kaspar von Niedbruck, was in regular touch with Lutheran reformers and collaborated with the rigorist Lutheran Matthias Flacius in the history of the Christian Church published from 1559 onwards and known as the Magdeburg Centuries. The Centuries assembled the materials for a history of Christendom as that of a godly minority who supported God’s truth against the forces of Antichrist and iniquity. Jacob Acontius was also in Maximilian’s early entourage before he left for Swizerland and England. In a Dialogue composed for his Habsburg patron, Acontius urged him to be a new King David, seeking his own way to Christian truth. Clerical efforts to straitjacket truth into confessional certainty were merely part of ‘Satan’s stratagems’. Rome and Madrid highlighted the dangers of a potentially Protestant emperor in waiting, and Maximilian II trimmed his sails to secure the succession after the death of Ferdinand in 1564.