When, in 2003, the then British prime minister, Tony Blair, was asked during a magazine interview a question about his religious beliefs, his leading advisor brusquely interrupted proceedings: ‘I’m sorry, we don’t do God.’ Though politicians elsewhere in the democratic world (particularly the United States) are less reticent to talk about faith than they are in the UK, it is widely taken for granted in modern Western society that ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are intrinsically separable spheres. Faith is understood to be private, not public, and represents the cultural property of specific groups and individuals, not the ordering principle of social and political association. Many Westerners find refusal or inability to distinguish between religion and politics (such as in parts of the contemporary Islamic world) both baffling and menacing. The Reformation is central to the story of how politics and religion began to come apart in European society, yet at the same time it witnessed the flowering of more intense and explicit synthesis between them. The political authorities of 16th- and 17th-century Europe most certainly did ‘do God’. Kings ruled in his name, and both they and (most of the time) their subjects accepted that the distribution of political power within society was not a matter of mere historical accident or agreed secular convention. Authority and hierarchy were divinely ordained, a dim earthly reflection of a perfect heavenly society, and an insight into the mind of God. Royal coronations were overtly sacral occasions: like priests, sovereigns were ‘anointed’ with sacred oil. The invoking of divine sanction on political power was a old theme, foundational to medieval European culture. But the Reformation supplied it with a new impetus, and with new, potentially corrosive, challenges. For what was the appropriate response to a state power professing the ‘wrong’ religion? The emerging and competing identities of the Reformation era were from the outset enmeshed in vital ways with political processes, making relations between states, and between rulers and subjects, more explicitly ideological than they had ever been. The Reformation was, in fact, the first great era of ideological politics, and in the 16th and 17th centuries, ideology meant religion.
We can begin by reminding ourselves of a sobering fact. The single most important determinant of religious allegiance in the Reformation was neither the enticing appeal of the new Gospel, nor the reassuring draw of the sacraments of the Catholic Church. The religious map of divided Western Christendom was fundamentally decided – in a universal extension of the German principle of cuius regio, eius religio – by the wishes of the powers-that-be. After initial ferments and enthusiasms, the Protestant Reformation ultimately triumphed where established governments encouraged or permitted it to, and it failed where they did not. There were, admittedly, important exceptions to this rule. In the Netherlands, an independent Protestant state was forged in the course of a national resistance struggle against the legitimate dynastic ruler, Philip II of Spain. In Scotland, a Calvinist Kirk achieved dominance in spite of the wishes of a Catholic queen, Mary Stewart. Conversely, in Ireland, the attempts of successive Tudor and Stuart governments to impose Protestantism on the nation foundered in the face of popular apathy and sporadic bouts of resistance. Nonetheless, elsewhere the pattern largely holds good. The religious ‘frontier’ eventually stabilized along a roughly geographic line, but it is important to abandon the inherited notion that Northern Europe was somehow destined to be Protestant; the South condemned to remain Catholic. Scholars used to think, in an unconscious objectification of their own cultural prejudices, that the triumph of the Reformation in England was simply inevitable, and that Mary Tudor’s attempts to reverse it in the 1550s were a doomed attempt to swim against the tide of history. Yet it is now widely recognized that foundations for long-term Catholic revival were laid during Mary’s reign, and that it was the queen’s premature death, not the religious DNA of the English people, that ensured the country’s future would be a Protestant one. It would be equally fallacious to attribute the failure of the Reformation in Spain to any national genetic predisposition for fiestas, Holy Week processions, and the cult of the Virgin Mary. Here, the first stirrings of Protestantism were ruthlessly and efficiently extinguished by an arm of state power – the Spanish Inquisition. Although what we might anachronistically term ‘public opinion’ was not a negligible factor (particularly in self-governing towns), state authorities made the decision whether or not to adopt the Reformation, and this, by definition, was a political calculation.
On what basis was that calculation made? The Reformation slips neatly, perhaps too neatly, into a broader narrative of European political change. That story can be called, in crude but allowable shorthand, the rise of the nation-state. Across Western and Central Europe in the later Middle Ages, secular rulers were consolidating and centralizing their authority, and interfering ever more directly in the running of the Church in their territories. The papal aspiration for universal spiritual monarchy, with the pontiff directly controlling the Church throughout Europe, and dictating terms to kings and emperors, peaked in the 12th century, and was more or less defunct by the beginning of the sixteenth. The popes of the Renaissance concerned themselves more modestly with the governance of the unruly papal states around Rome, and with the micro-politics of the Italian peninsula. Elsewhere, they settled for deference to their doctrinal authority, and for some negotiated involvement in the financial and managerial affairs of national churches. The repudiation of that residual power and influence is sometimes seen as part of a natural progression towards national autonomy and maturity on the part of European states. Yet the first regional rulers to show real enthusiasm for the Reformation were not the established national monarchs, but the wannabes: princelings who, under the nominal suzerainty of the emperor, governed German territories that were not quite kingdoms in scale or substance. The connection makes considerable sense. On the face of it, German princes had much to gain from adopting Luther’s cause. Politically, they could consolidate ecclesiastical control in their territories, incorporating the church’s administration into the mechanisms of government, while asserting greater freedom of manoeuvre vis-à-vis the emperor. Financially, they might with a (relatively) clear conscience plunder the wealth of the church, taxing the clergy and seizing the lands and endowments of monasteries. A case in point was Duke Ulrich, ruler of the southwestern territory of Württemberg, who confiscated three-quarters of all ecclesiastical property in the duchy, his agents scraping the gold paint from church altar-pieces. It is also true that – in contrast to a traditional Catholic insistence on the rights and liberties of the Church – Luther’s theology could look remarkably ruler-friendly. As his 1525 outburst against rebelling peasants made clear, Luther was an instinctive proponent of political order, setting much store by St Paul’s monition (Romans 13:1) that Christian souls should subject themselves to established authority, since ‘the powers that be are ordained of God’. Luther was no fawning political sycophant: he regarded secular power as a kind of necessary evil, and in a 1523 treatise on Temporal Authority: To What Extent it Should be Obeyed memorably called princes ‘usually the greatest fools or the worst knaves on earth’, their function being to serve as ‘God’s jailers and hangmen’. The starting point of Luther’s ecclesiology (doctrine of the Church) was that the ‘true Church’ was beyond all secular coercion and control, as it was an invisible union of the hearts and souls of justified Christians. But this left a messy morass of human wickedness to deal with in this world, which princes (ideally but not necessarily good ones) were tasked to contain and control. In what is sometimes called Luther’s ‘two kingdoms theory’, the ‘kingdom of God’ was to be left to itself, but the ‘kingdom of the world’, including the outward forms of church organization, was a sphere of legitimate political compulsion. Luther thus approved Elector John’s ‘Visitation’ of Saxony in 1528, which organized under princely auspices the introduction of Reformation into the rural parishes, and set up a territorial church as a branch of state administration.
Beyond a certain point, cynicism abut human motivation risks becoming a form of naivety. It is implausible that the rulers who steered their territories towards the Reformation all did so entirely on the basis of cold political calculation. For a start, there were considerable risks: the kings of England and Sweden both faced serious popular Catholic rebellions, and in the case of German princes, the wrath of the emperor was not to be taken lightly. For committed supporters of the Protestant cause such as Philip of Hesse or John Frederick of Saxony, it is likely that diplomatic and military expenditure in the 1530s and 1540s more than cancelled out profits from confiscated church revenues. John Frederick in particular proved his ideological mettle. Captured in 1547 at the crushing imperial victory at Mühlberg, he refused to recant his Protestantism or recognize the Augsburg Interim, accepting instead exile and imprisonment. By contrast, the most blatant case of religious policy driven by self-serving motives is probably that of Henry VIII, who discovered objections to papal authority in the early 1530s in order to fix his marital difficulties. But even Henry seems to have sincerely believed he was acting in accordance with God’s will.
The politics of Reformation and Counter-Reformation were rarely clear-cut. For one thing, truths of faith aside, it was not obvious that opportunities for the enhancement of political and financial power were greater for rulers leaving the Catholic fold than for those remaining within it. The most powerful of Europe’s national monarchs, the kings of France, drew immense kudos from the ceremonies and rituals of the Catholic Church, and from the title ‘most Christian kings’ which centuries earlier the papacy had bestowed on their line. There was in fact little, politically, to attract French monarchs to the Reformation, as under the terms of an agreement with the papacy in 1516 they enjoyed considerable rights to tax the clergy and control appointments within the French Catholic Church. It was much the same story in Spain, whose rulers had earned the papal title of ‘Catholic Kings’ for capturing the last Muslim stronghold of Granada in 1492. Other concessions included permission (1478) to set up and control a powerful ecclesiastical Inquisition, and the right, which turned out to be a very substantial one, to patronage over all ecclesiastical positions in the newly discovered territories of the Americas. Charles V and Philip II were undoubtedly sincerely pious, but their Catholicism did not impede their effectiveness as rulers. The threat of Protestantism could supply leverage for Catholic monarchs in their negotiations with the papacy. James V of Scotland, for example, was able to demand lucrative taxation rights over the Church as the price of his loyalty to Rome. The rulers of Bavaria, flag-bearers of beleaguered German Catholicism, were in the later 16th century granted extensive control over a virtually autonomous national Church, which the dukes administered through their own Clerical Council.
In the later 20th century we were urged to acknowledge ‘the personal is the political’; in the later 16th century piety was political. When Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria (r. 1598–1651) ordered his subjects to carry a set of rosary beads around with them at all times, and to face fines or the pillory for eating meat on Fridays, he was making a statement about the kind of regime he headed, and the extent to which subjects must identify, in hearts and minds, with their ruler’s priorities. There is a historians’ term-of-art for the processes at work here. Since the 1970s, scholars have used ‘confessionalization’ to describe how the Reformation intersected with the agenda of state-building in an age of increasing political centralization. The argument is that political authorities across Europe in the later 16th and 17th centuries, Protestant and Catholic alike, assiduously promoted a single form of ‘confessional’ Christianity within their territories, and repressed alternatives, as a means of increasing control over their subjects. Confessional (from the Latin confessio, to acknowledge) here refers to the various confessions of faith, or statements of defined doctrine, which were drawn up as the religious divisions in Europe hardened and clarified from the mid-16th century. Members of the rival confessions were increasingly expected to identify culturally and politically with their church’s teachings, and to know what those teachings were. Lutherans rallied around the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and the 1580 Book of Concord. The Reformed had the so-called Helvetic Confessions of 1536 and 1566, and the formulas of Calvinist orthodoxy from the 1619 Synod of Dort; Catholics, the decrees of Trent.
Counter-intuitively to our modern expectations, religion is here an agent of modernization, helping to create more uniform and obedient societies, suffused with a sense of patriotic and pious identification with the Lutheran, Calvinist, or Roman Catholic motherland. Only the Church had permanent representatives in every town and village, with the potential, via pulpit or confessional box, to reach the conscience of every subject. So control over religion, it has been argued, was more vital to the development of the modern state even than monopoly of military force, or a workable taxation system. Confessionalization was not an automatic process: it had to be worked at. Popular religious culture was often stubbornly local, regulated by tradition, and passive and undogmatic in outlook. Thus church and state authorities co-operated to bring people up to speed, requiring them to learn orthodox doctrine by attendance at sermons, Sunday schools, or catechism classes – all of which necessitated the active participation of a reliable and properly educated body of clergy, with horizons beyond the boundaries of the village. The desired outcome was ‘social discipline’: having internalized their faith, Christians of varying stripes would become model subjects, less given to the riotous, licentious, or superstitious behaviour that caused concern to superiors.
9. By c. 1600 the religious and political map of Europe was dividing along clearer ‘confessional’ lines
One attraction of the ‘confessionalization thesis’ is that it gets us away from an old-fashioned doctrinally obsessed model of the Reformation, allowing us to view the process in more objective sociological terms, and to appreciate the extent to which Protestant and Catholic Reformations resembled each other, sharing objectives and methods. Yet this is also the theory’s weakness, stressing religion’s ‘function’ at the expense of its content, and ironing out the quirks and peculiarities that actually made religion meaningful for 16th- and 17th-century people. There is also the suspicion that one size doesn’t really fit all. Confessionalization works well for certain German Protestant states, and outliers such as Sweden. It also looks plausible in 17th-century France, where Louis XIV’s road to absolutism was paved with good Catholic intentions. But the designation is more awkward for other parts of the Catholic world, where the Church and its institutions maintained degrees of independence from the apparatus of the state. The reforming intentions of the Council of Trent – for example, over residence of bishops in their dioceses – were actually in conflict with priorities of Catholic rulers, who wished to continue to use bishoprics to reward their servants. And there are also important parts of Europe for which the confessionalization model doesn’t seem to work at all, such as England and the Netherlands, which managed already in the 17th century to be religiously pluralistic without ceasing to be politically well-developed states. Undue concentration on ‘state-building’ in connection with the politics of the Reformation is also likely to obscure a phenomenon of great importance: the extent to which religious faith and fervour could be harmful to, or subversive of, the interests of sovereign rulers, and its potential to produce sustained and damaging conflict.
The Reformation was an era of fairly unremitting ideological warfare in Europe, perhaps the first in which states fought each other for reasons other than territorial aggrandizement, or the honour and glory of their sovereigns. With the peculiar exception of crusades against infidels abroad, and (occasionally) heretics at home, medieval rulers did not really fight wars for religious reasons, for all that political and military alliances involving the pope were invariably christened ‘Holy Leagues’. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify a 16th- or 17th-century conflict that was fought for purely religious reasons, uncontaminated by political, economic, or dynastic considerations. But religious rivalry produced conflicts within and between states that were more prolonged, bloody, and embittered than they would otherwise have been. The first identifiably religious war of the Reformation broke out in 1529, in a crucible of military energy and expertise, the Swiss Confederation, long-standing exporter of tough mercenary troops. Cooperation among the loose federation of autonomous cantons in Switzerland dissolved as some cantons adopted Protestantism, and others remained defiantly Catholic. In these circumstances, established arrangements for the joint administration of subject territories broke down, and war was declared. A renewed outbreak in 1531 led to the death of Huldrych Zwingli, probably the only front-rank theologian ever to lose his life in battle. Thereafter, one can compile a sorry litany of major armed conflicts with a sufficiently pronounced ideological element to be usefully termed religious wars: Charles V’s conflicts with the German Protestant princes, 1547, and 1552–5; seven ‘wars of religion’ in France, 1562–98, with a sequel 1610–29; the protracted revolt of the Netherlands, 1567–1648; the Scottish civil wars of 1559–60 and 1567–73; Elizabethan England’s war with Spain, 1585–1604; sporadic warfare and rebellion in Ireland, 1560–1603; the Thirty Years War, 1618–48; civil wars in Britain and Ireland, 1637–54, and 1688–90; Louis XIV’s repression of bloody Huguenot rebellion in 1702–11. War is always nasty, but ideological conflicts have a particular ability to produce atrocities. Dutch rebels targeted priests and friars in the 1570s, and Cromwell’s soldiers slaughtered Catholic townspeople during the reconquest of Ireland in 1649. Perhaps the single most notorious incident – certainly in Protestant Europe, where memory of it was assiduously perpetuated – was the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 24 August 1572, which ushered in the fourth war of religion in France. During a period of tense and tenuous peace, a botched assassination attempt against the Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny inspired Charles IX and the powerful Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, to pre-empt reprisals by finishing the job. Believing they had royal authority behind them, mobs of Catholics in Paris then turned on Huguenot neighbours in three days of savage slaughter, with a wave of massacres following in other towns across the country. At a minimum estimate, 2,000 men, women, and children were slain in Paris, and another 3,000 in the provinces. The violence was extreme, and frequently ritualistic: corpses were mutilated, pregnant women eviscerated. Heresy was perceived as a pollution, a plague, from which the city needed to be cleansed. Pope Gregory XIII saw the hand of God in the disaster which had befallen the Protestants, and ordered a commemorative medal to be struck.
Yet there was in the end to be no military solution to the problem of false belief. The religious wars seldom finished in total victory, and their endings required the combatants, literally, to come to terms with one another. The sporadic rounds of war and civil war left religious minorities entrenched in many European states: Catholics in the northern Netherlands, England, and Ireland (where they were numerically a majority); Protestants in France; Lutherans, Catholics, and Calvinists in various combinations in German states where another confession was dominant. The protection of minority co-religionists in officially hostile environments became a recognized aim of diplomacy: the treaties which ended the Thirty Years War would not have been accepted on any side without the rights of freedom of conscience and liberty for private worship they granted within the empire. There is a real irony here, for virtually no one regarded religious toleration as a positive good in itself. But if religious dissidents could not be eliminated, compromise was the price of peace, and toleration was an unforeseen outcome of war. Some old assumptions which the Reformations had emphatically sought to shore up – the fusion of religious and political loyalties, the complete identity of Christian culture and civil society – thus began slowly to unravel. When Catholics in Elizabethan or Stuart England protested their complete loyalty to the crown in ‘civil’ matters, they were implicitly proposing a separation of political and religious spheres, and demarcating a space where the authority of the state did not intrude.
If grudging official acceptance of religious minorities was a messy, pragmatic, and unexpected consequence of religious conflict, the Reformation also challenged the established status of political authority in more direct and self-conscious ways. The defiance of rulers by subjects of a different religious persuasion was a political fact on the ground, but the defiers wanted to feel legally and ethically justified in the steps they were taking. The result was another momentous development: an unprecedented theorizing of the limits of political obedience, and the articulation of fully fledged theories of subaltern resistance.
Of course, rebellion was not a new phenomenon in the 16th century, and rebels had always needed an excuse as well as a cause. The classic one was that insurgents were not really rebelling against the sovereign at all; they were acting to protect him from corrupt and wicked counsellors who had succeeded in leading him astray. This evasion still had legs in the Reformation era: it was the argument of the Yorkshire Catholic rebels who in 1536 rose against Henry VIII’s policies in a ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’. But as a basis for sustained ideological dissent, the argument was both implausible and impractical. Serious debates over the resistance question began in Lutheran Germany, as the Protestant princes considered options in the face of Charles V’s hostility. Lutheran theologians produced an ingenious amalgam of doctrines of political obligation and constitutional theory. All rulers had an inescapable duty to protect and preserve true religion; at the same time, the German princes were jointly responsible with the emperor for the good order of the empire. If he failed in his duty to uphold true religion, acting as a tool of the anti-christian pope, then he could legitimately be resisted. This was not a recipe for anarchy, but a narrowly defined set of circumstances under which ‘inferior magistrates’ might call the superior magistrate to account.
Calvin’s position was remarkably similar – he was not the revolutionary proponent of principled resistance he is sometimes cracked up to be. In the Institutes he observed merely that the constitutions of some states allowed for ‘defenders of the people’s freedom’ to guard against tyranny – the ephors of ancient Sparta, or the tribunes of Rome. Cautiously, he added that the estates or parliaments of modern kingdoms ‘perhaps’ performed the same function. But Calvin’s persistent diatribes against the horrors of ‘false’ worship, and the obligation on true Christians to shun it, were an invitation to at least passive resistance and civil disobedience. It was in response to actual persecutions, and the beginnings of Counter-Reformation in areas lacking the federated power structure of Germany, that some of Calvin’s followers developed less equivocal and more radical arguments. A trio of refugees from Mary Tudor’s England, Christopher Goodman, John Knox, and John Ponet, broke spectacularly from the notion that even ungodly rulers were (in the formula of St Paul) ‘ordained of God’, and concluded that wicked rulers could be overthrown or even killed – the doctrine of tyrannicide. Some French Calvinists went down the same path: Philippe du Plessis-Mornay’s Vindication Against Tyrants (1579) argued that an ungodly monarch had forfeited the right to rule, having broken the terms of a covenant with God and the people, and similar conclusions were reached by the Scot George Buchanan. Principle was shortly put into practice in the Netherlands, where in 1580 the rebel leader William of Orange openly renounced the sovereignty of Philip II for having failed in his royal obligations. In the 17th century, the Protestant English deposed not one but two of their kings, Charles I and James II; the former for being insufficiently Protestant, and the latter for converting to Rome (some tender consciences hiding behind the fiction that James had ‘abdicated’ by fleeing the country).
Resistance theory was not a Protestant monopoly, and some of the most radical challenges to political authority were Catholic ones. The popes had long claimed a superior status to all secular monarchs, and the right, in extreme circumstances, to remove them from office. The papal ‘deposing power’ was pretty much a dead letter by the end of the Middle Ages, but the Reformation threatened to give it a new lease of life. A 1534 rebellion against Henry VIII in Ireland, led by the charismatic young earl of Kildare, marked a very early break with conventions of late medieval political protest. Kildare repudiated allegiance to Henry, and aspired to place Ireland under the direct sovereignty of the pope. A later, and equally unsuccessful Tudor rebellion – the 1569 Rising of the Northern Earls against Elizabeth I – encouraged Pius V to blow the dust off the deposing power. His bull Regnans in Excelsis of 1570 declared Elizabeth an excommunicated heretic, and ordered her subjects to withdraw obedience from her – a document making life very difficult for English Catholics over the following years. Subsequently, leading Jesuit theologians like the Italian Robert Belarmine, the Spaniard Francisco Suarez, and the Englishman Robert Persons developed justifications for tyrannicide that caught up with the Calvinist position. For Catholics as for Protestants, much of the momentum came from the situation in later 16th-century France, where the crown’s move towards an increasingly ‘politique’ position infuriated the militant Catholic League, formed to resist political compromise with the Huguenots.
10. A procession of the militant and anti-royalist French Catholic League in 1590, with prominent and heavily armed priests and friars
After Henry III ordered the assassination of the League leader, the duke of Guise, in 1588, preachers openly called for his overthrow as a tyrant. The practice, as well as theory of tyrannicide became something of a Catholic speciality in these years. The first modern-style assassination of a head of state was the shooting by a French Catholic of William of Orange, in Delft in 1584. Henry III and Henry IV of France were both stabbed to death by fanatical Catholics, in 1589 and 1610. And James I of England narrowly escaped a still more spectacular end in 1605, when papist conspirators plotted to blow up parliament with a huge quantity of gunpowder.
After the upheavals of the wars of religion subsided, the immediate outcome of the Reformation was probably to enhance and entrench political authority. With a few notable exceptions (such as England and the Netherlands), ‘absolutism’ was the order of the day for later 17th-century European states, with representative assemblies in decline and the untrammelled exercise of monarchical power presented as a positive good. Resistance theories went out of fashion, as the product of a violent and divisive recent past. But the formulation of considered justifications of political non-compliance, based on a contractual element in the three-way relationship between ruler, ruled, and God, was of considerable significance for the future. Their originators aimed not, of course, at the establishment of democracy, or political liberty for its own sake, but at the extirpation of ‘idolatry’ and ‘heresy’. Nonetheless, these works would exert influence on the revolutionaries of the 18th century, American and French, and thus play a part in the inauguration of a new and very different political world.