Читать книгу Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World - Alec Ryrie - Страница 13
ОглавлениеBe it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods.
– DANIEL 3:18
Protestantism was born in the fear and hope of bloodshed. From Luther’s first appearance on the public stage, it was clear he risked execution as a heretic. The killing actually took a little while to begin; the first of Luther’s disciples to be burned alive as unrepentant heretics were two Dutch friars who died in 1523. More soon followed. Over the next half a century, more than three thousand men and women were put to death in Europe for crimes of belief. The killings were neither steady nor evenly spread, but were concentrated in short outbursts in a few countries: France, England, above all the Netherlands.1 By the 1560s, judicial executions were giving way to full-scale religious warfare. Those casualties are much harder to count but certainly ran into the hundreds of thousands. When the killing finally abated, from the middle of the seventeenth century, it left behind entrenched bitterness, punctuated by ongoing spasms of brutality.
This violence marked Protestantism permanently. Because Protestants were often its victims, it kept many Protestants in a kind of defensive crouch for two centuries, a posture that had lasting effects. But they traded in the same currency. When they had the chance, they persecuted not only Catholics but also each other. And for all their differences with Catholicism, they readily closed ranks with the papists against real or imagined threats from beyond Christianity’s bounds.
The alternative – whispered by a few in the sixteenth century, spoken by a growing chorus through the seventeenth – was religious coexistence. Modern Protestants have often enjoyed telling themselves a self-congratulatory story in which their tradition gave rise to tolerance and freedom, and that is rather less than a half-truth. But it is not completely false. This was indeed the age when a measure of religious tolerance began to be possible, both in theory and in practice. Our subject in this chapter is how Protestants learned to die, to kill, and under some circumstances, not to kill.
Protestants thought about these questions using two ancient Christian categories: martyrdom and heresy. Martyrs are literally witnesses – believers who bear witness to their faith in the most vivid and unanswerable way, by choosing to die rather than to renounce it. Martyrs were supposed to go to their deaths with lamblike submission and defiant resolve – like St Stephen, the first Christian martyr in the Acts of the Apostles, or indeed like Jesus Christ himself.
Because martyrdom was the highest honour for which any Christian might hope, to be persecuted was, paradoxically, proof of God’s love. That paradox has helped give Christianity its tremendous resilience. The harder your enemies hit you, the firmer your convictions become. State violence normally works by intimidating its victims into compliance. Ancient Christians found instead that martyrdom served as a kind of spiritual judo, in which they derived strength from the very fact of their persecution. The blood of the martyrs, proverbially, was the seed of the Church. The end of the Roman persecution of Christians in the fourth century meant that the supply of martyrs dried up, and in medieval Europe it almost ceased, yet the rarity of true martyrdom only made the ideal more alluring.
At the same time as it nursed this hunger for martyrdom, Western Christendom developed its concept of heresy, a word that literally means “choice”. A doctrinal error is not a heresy. Heresy is an act of the will: asserting your own judgement rather than submitting obediently to the mind of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit. An error only becomes heretical when someone consciously and deliberately defies the Church’s ruling. Orthodoxy versus heresy is more about obedience versus wilfulness than truth versus error. Heresy is a moral offence, not an intellectual one.
In medieval Europe, heretics were seen both as threats to public safety, peddling seductive lies that might drag innocents down to hell with them, and as traitors against God, wilfully spreading disgusting slanders against him. Good Christians could hardly stand idly by. So from the tenth century onward, heresy was treated as a crime. Because medieval justice was public, symbolic, and exemplary, this might ultimately mean death by burning: a symbol of the fires of hell to which heretics had condemned themselves, a vividly gruesome deterrent, and a practical way of disposing of a body unworthy of Christian burial. It also made a good show, and in northern Europe, where dry wood and good weather were rarities, often an extended one.
It is worth the effort to see these atrocities through our forebears’ eyes. They lived in a much more publicly violent society than we do, but they did not impose such terrible punishments out of simple malice. The ideal outcome of a heresy trial was always repentance. Heretics who renounced their errors were usually spared, unless they were repeat offenders. This was why heresy inquiries were led by priests; they were pastoral processes, whose purpose was to reconcile sinners. Heresy both began and ended as a choice: to live in the true faith, or to die in error. The threat of fire was a merciful severity, helping waverers to choose wisely.
For centuries, this worked. A series of medieval dissident movements such as the Cathars and the Waldensians were suppressed or eliminated. In the late fifteenth century, a new variant arose in Spain, where Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity were treated as heretics if they kept the rites of their old faith. The Spanish Inquisition pursued them with unprecedented ferocity, killing over ten thousand. But this is better understood as a state pogrom, a spasm of Jew-hating that happened to make use of the heresy laws. Elsewhere, heretics were hunted sporadically, in ones and twos. It was a small price to pay for keeping a whole continent united in the faith. Not many contemporaries were troubled by the fact that their religion celebrated martyrs who chose to die rather than renounce their beliefs and also compelled dissidents to choose between death and renouncing their beliefs.
The problem, as St Augustine had recognized in the fifth century, was that martyrs cannot in fact prove that their religion is correct by dying for it. People die for all kinds of beliefs, and they cannot all be right. Augustine concluded that the cause, not the death, makes a true martyr. If you die for the truth, you are a martyr, but if you die for an error, you are deluded or a servant of the devil. That may sound like self-serving relativism, but again, the role of the Church is decisive. The truth is determined not by anyone’s private judgement but by the Church’s collective voice, guided by the Holy Spirit. You might have honest scruples about doctrine, but how could your private doubts weigh against the certain authority of the Church?
This was precisely the argument Martin Luther’s opponents threw at him. And Luther, utterly convinced of the truth he had perceived in Scripture, concluded, logically enough, that any authority that denounced that truth must be false. He was driven to deny that the Church could authoritatively denounce heresy. That was itself almost the greatest heresy of all. Across Europe, the Church’s traditional machinery ground slowly into action against the new Protestant enemy.
England’s example is typical. In 1521, Henry VIII was still ostentatiously Catholic. With an eye on the burgeoning scandal in Germany, he sponsored a public burning of heretical books in London, accompanied by forceful preaching against heresy. This was a theatrical pre-emptive strike; there were as yet no English Lutherans, and the books had had to be imported specially for the show. When the performance was repeated five years later, there were a few real English converts, some of whom made humiliating public recantations during the performance.2 This was how the English had long dealt with their own indigenous heretics, the unsophisticated but stubbornly ineradicable movement known as the Lollards. Lollards were serial recanters, who mocked the Church’s rites scabrously in their private gatherings but were rarely willing to stand firm when their lives were at stake.
Yet it soon became clear that these new heretics were different: not peasants deploying crude commonsense rationalism, but clerics and scholars, hard to overawe and unseemly to burn. The bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, spent long hours trying to woo individual suspects back to orthodoxy, smoothing over troubles and compromising where he could. He persuaded England’s most outspoken early evangelical, Thomas Bilney, to make an ambiguous, carefully negotiated recantation in 1527.3
Not everyone shared Tunstall’s instinct that the Reformation was a misunderstanding to be resolved between gentlemen. Thomas More, lawyer, friend of Erasmus’s, and England’s most famous scholar, was appalled by Tunstall’s compromises; the law was “so far stretched forth that the leather could scant hold”.4 More, softhearted neither toward others nor toward himself, favoured rigour, and as the heresy problem burgeoned, he took charge. Over the next five years, a swathe of suspects were imprisoned, interrogated, and sometimes tortured, and a dozen were burned. Bilney, stricken by his conscience after his recantation and newly defiant, was one of the first to die.
Tunstall and More’s dilemma – soft words versus exemplary rigour – was repeated across Western Christendom. Few countries had legal bureaucracies capable of full-scale campaigns of repression. Spain and Portugal had a battle-hardened Inquisition which ensured that no popular Protestantism of any kind ever took root there; a fledgling evangelical movement briefly appeared in Spain in 1558 and was swiftly exterminated. Italy is a more tantalizing case, because it did have a nascent evangelical movement in the 1530s. But when the Inquisition was re-established across Italy in 1542, these reformers either fled to exile or returned to conformity. This was how it should have worked everywhere. If the response is tough and consistent enough, hardly any burnings should be necessary.
France shows how easily this could go wrong. Francis I, king from 1515 to 1547, was amused by fashionably daring scholarship and also locked in a generational struggle with the Emperor Charles V, Luther’s nemesis. He was therefore tempted to give houseroom to moderate reformers. Paris around 1530 was a tantalizing place for evangelicals; this was where John Calvin was converted. But as Tunstall had discovered, appeasement served only to embolden Protestants. One night in 1534, a series of outrageously provocative placards denouncing the Mass were posted anonymously across Paris. One found its way to the door of the king’s bedchamber. A sudden wave of repression followed, and many reformers, including Calvin, fled abroad. But repression was not consistently maintained. France still hoped to recruit Germany’s Lutheran princes as allies against the emperor. Calvin dedicated his Institutio to King Francis because he believed that he could still win him over.
In any case, the French state did not have the means to enforce a blanket policy of persecution. Nor did most of its neighbours. Even in centralized England, where Thomas More’s repression would probably have succeeded if Henry VIII’s marital drama had not intervened, English heresy hunters found themselves hamstrung by legal technicalities. It was harder still in the decentralized or fragmented polities that made up most of Europe, where the whim of individual bishops or judges could set local religious policy. Local persecution often merely pushed dissidents across porous borders. The problem was at its worst in the Netherlands, where a determined assault on heresy ran up against flimsy borders, entrenched local legal cultures, a cat’s cradle of jurisdictions, and some very cosmopolitan cities. Well over a thousand deaths did no more than keep the lid on the problem.
As the Church cried heresy, the fledgling Protestant movement countered it with martyrdom, an ideal that had been at the heart of Luther’s thought from the beginning. He distinguished between what he called theologies of glory and theologies of the cross. A theologian of glory was self-serving and self-aggrandizing, whereas a theologian of the cross followed Christ’s path of self-denial. Christ’s true Church must be a suffering, persecuted Church, constantly assaulted by the devil. If a church was at peace, rich, and powerful, that alone proved it was already securely in Satan’s bondage, even before it proceeded to attack the true, persecuted believers.
So Protestants embraced martyrdom, seeking out persecution as a sign that God loved them. One of Martin Luther’s great spiritual crises came in the late 1520s when he realized that the sentence of condemnation that had hung over him since the Diet of Worms was unlikely ever to be carried out. Surely this meant God had rejected him?5 In reality, of course, most Protestants never faced arrest or trial. Persecution was a fact, but it was also a myth, and that was what made it powerful. The tales of Luther’s courage at Worms, and then of the first actual martyrs, were treasured, retold, and replayed in believers’ imaginations as they put themselves in their heroes’ shoes and asked themselves what they would do if they came to the time of trial.
In the 1550s, this storytelling culminated in collected volumes of martyr stories published in Dutch, German, and French, their authors joining individual atrocities into great national struggles between the suffering Church of Christ and the cruel church of Antichrist. A still grander narrative was planned by an Englishman, John Foxe. Having originally conceived a vast Latin encyclopedia of cruelty, uniting English and Continental stories, he was eventually persuaded instead to produce an English-language martyrology, the Acts and Monuments, first published in 1563, in the wake of Queen Mary’s sharp persecution of Protestants. Under the new Protestant queen, Elizabeth, Foxe set England’s sufferings in the context of the whole of Christian history. Ancient Christian martyrs and modern Protestant martyrs were brethren. Persecuting Roman emperors had now been replaced by persecuting Roman Catholics.6
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, as it swiftly became known, would become fundamental to English-speaking Protestants’ imagination and has been repeatedly reprinted, abridged, and updated. It is a thing of paradoxes. Foxe was a consummate internationalist, an idealistic radical who conscientiously opposed all religious violence and saw England’s state Protestantism as badly compromised. But his book became an icon of national identity, a charter for that same state Protestantism, and a manifesto for religious hatred. To read it was to learn that Catholics always and forever seek Protestants’ blood, and that their hatred may sleep but never dies.7
This was an exaggeration but not a fantasy. Catholics did not thirst for Protestant blood, but many did dream of wiping Protestantism out. But just because someone is out to get you does not mean you are not paranoid. The popularity of martyr stories shows how much Protestants saw the world in apocalyptic terms. Even those who lived in peaceful times under securely Protestant rule were ready to understand their lives as dramas of persecution, whether the villains were domestic political opponents, godless neighbours, or the devil himself. It was an alluring, all-consuming view of the world. The daily struggle of human life was a drama written by God’s hand, in which the struggle itself was the surest guarantee of victory.
Protestants were formidably difficult to suppress. They were impervious to quiet reasonableness and only drew strength from persecution. By the mid-sixteenth century, however, Catholic powers were developing two other ways of tackling the problem, two techniques that between them kept Protestantism on the defensive for nearly two hundred years. Whereas in the 1560s it was reasonable to fear, or hope, that Protestantism would soon sweep all before it, instead it found itself contained and driven back across Europe.
The most effective engine of this Catholic fightback was the epochal reform programme sometimes called the Counter-Reformation. Between 1545 and 1563, a great council of the Catholic Church met intermittently at Trent in northern Italy. It decisively rejected Protestant doctrines and laid out an ambitious vision for disciplinary reform and educational renewal of the Church, which was implemented with verve by a reinvigorated papacy and by a series of religious orders. Over the next century, a more disciplined, better-educated Catholicism took shape, depriving the Protestants of some of their best talking points. Many Protestants believed that the Council of Trent had hatched a fiendish plot to slaughter Protestants. The truth was worse: it had hatched a plot to breathe new life into Catholicism, and Protestants struggled to respond.8
The other engine of Catholic revival was war. It began in France. By the 1550s, French Protestants, hardened by twenty years of intermittent persecution, were being fortified and organized by missionaries sent from Calvin’s Geneva. The movement was on the march. High-profile converts were being won, and in 1559 the French Reformed Church even had the audacity to hold a secret national synod in Paris. In that same year, King Henry II, hammer of heretics, was killed in a gruesome jousting accident. Protestants naturally saw this as divine vengeance. In the political turmoil that followed, one party, led by the noble family of Guise, was staunchly Catholic, while the other, led by the king’s widow, Catherine de’ Medici, was still Catholic but willing to buy the Protestants’ support in the currency of toleration. By the end of 1560, official persecution had largely ceased.
It was a moment of heady religious anarchy. France’s Calvinist churches surged into the open. Street sermons attracted vast crowds, singing psalms to the plain metrical tunes that were becoming their battle hymns. By early 1562, something close to a tenth of the entire French population, and nearly half of the nobility, were affiliated with Calvinist churches. Not since Germany in the early 1520s had there been such an episode of breakneck Protestant expansion. A Protestant France suddenly seemed not only possible but inevitable.9
In Germany in the 1520s, however, the Catholic establishment had been bewildered and paralysed. Forty years later, its French counterparts fought back. Catholic preachers and polemicists matched the Protestants book for book and insult for insult. When official persecution ceased, vigilantism took over. As tinder-dry resentment and hatred piled up, eventually, inevitably, a spark caught. It happened on 1 March 1562, in the north-eastern town of Vassy. The duke of Guise, leader of the Catholic hard-liners, stopped there to attend Mass. A large Calvinist congregation was assembled illegally in a converted barn nearby, and the duke’s men tried to break up the meeting. A scuffle broke out. Someone threw a stone at the duke. He ordered the barn to be sealed and burned to the ground. Dozens of Calvinists were killed.
So began a series of civil wars that would last, on and off, for thirty-five years. The Protestant nobility mobilized for self-defence and to defeat the Guise faction. The Guise aimed, more simply, to exterminate French Protestantism. Two successive kings, Charles IX and Henry III, were caught in the middle: Catholic, but hoping for compromise of some sort. Repeatedly, they declared pacifications granting restricted but real rights to the Protestant minority. Repeatedly, the kingdom collapsed into violence again.
The Protestants fought tenaciously and in the end secured a passably honourable stalemate that won them protected status for most of a century. The spring of 1562 was, however, French Protestantism’s high-water mark. Once the fighting had begun, the conversions stopped, and the Protestants were on the defensive, in the streets as well as on the battlefield. Violence kills people but also divides them. Once blood has been spilled, it is very hard to remain neutral or persuadable. During the first religious war of 1562–63, virtually all French Christians became entrenched in one of the two religious parties, and thereafter viewed each other as enemies.
The violence ran both ways. Protestants took over several towns, sometimes slaughtering the Catholic leadership and often targeting Catholic priests and defiling Catholic churches. They mutilated the saints’ statues, which they believed to be blasphemous idols. Female saints’ statues were liable to have their noses cut off, as if they were syphilitic whores. But most popular violence was driven by the Catholic majority, urged by their preachers to purify communities polluted by heretics living in their midst. Paris became a cauldron of anti-Protestant hatred.10
In 1572, it boiled over. Yet another royal peace plan was being tried. But when the Protestant grandees gathered in Paris and their military leader was wounded by an anonymous sniper, tensions boiled up immediately. With both sides suspecting treachery and plotting pre-emptive strikes, the king decided he could no longer remain above the fray. Instead, he tried to eliminate the Protestant leadership at a stroke. Before dawn on Sunday, 24 August 1572, St Bartholomew’s Day, royal soldiers murdered the wounded man and several other Protestant dignitaries in their beds. It was intended as a surgical strike, but the people of Paris could read the signals. Crying, “The king wills it”, Catholic mobs set out on an unprecedented orgy of destruction. In three days, some three thousand Protestants were killed, along with any Catholics who defended them. Over the following month, this massacre was echoed in a dozen French cities with histories of bitter interreligious tension; perhaps a further six thousand died.11
The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was the defining moment of the French religious wars. It was not exactly premeditated, but nor did the perpetrators try to disown it. Pope Gregory XIII struck a medal in celebration of the massacre and commissioned commemorative frescoes. And not without reason: the massacre achieved something that individual trials and executions could not. It broke the bravado of Protestantism’s martyr complex. The scale and speed of the killing dazed Protestants, who now questioned whether God was really on their side. Rumours spoke of fifty thousand, a hundred thousand dead. “The whole of France”, wrote Geneva’s city council, “is bathed in the blood of innocent people and covered with dead bodies.” While in truth the numbers of the dead were only a tiny proportion of France’s Protestants, the massacre virtually eliminated Protestantism from large areas of the country. In Rouen, for every Protestant who was killed, ten converted to Catholicism. Catholic Europe had finally discovered how to scare Protestants into conformity.12
Those who survived and stood their ground felt that every paranoid suspicion of Catholic treachery had been justified. Calvin’s successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, saw the massacre as proof of a “universal conspiracy”. French Protestants dug into their strongholds in southern and western France, and the religious wars resumed with fresh bitterness. They wore on until the mid-1590s, when a new king, Henry IV – a Protestant who converted to Catholicism in order to unite his kingdom – brought the Catholic hardliners to heel. The wars were ended by the 1598 Edict of Nantes, which granted clear but limited rights to worship, self-government, and self-defence to “the so-called reformed religion”. By then, the Protestant minority was half the size it had been in 1562. A lifetime later, in 1685, French Protestantism was once more outlawed altogether.
France contained and rolled back Protestantism at the cost of three and a half decades of devastating civil war. The story would be repeated in the Netherlands, where in 1566 a sudden cessation of persecution let loose an upsurge of Protestant sympathy. Protestants called it the “Wonderyear”, but prematurely. A swift crackdown gave way to a grinding eighty-year war between the Dutch and their Spanish Catholic rulers, splitting the Netherlands into a Spanish-ruled Catholic south and an independent Protestant north: the origin of the divide between the modern kingdoms of Belgium and the Netherlands. Again, the violence was both vicious and effective. Antwerp, the Protestants’ former stronghold, was brutally sacked by a Spanish army in 1575. Protestants were all but driven out of the south.
The last and most terrible of the religious wars was the Thirty Years War, which began in 1618 as an attempt by the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, to suppress a Protestant rebellion in Bohemia. A crushing victory there emboldened him to try to wipe out Protestantism throughout the empire. First Denmark, then Sweden, and finally France (for political rather than religious reasons) intervened against the Catholic onslaught and managed between them to beat it back. The eventual peace confirmed the empire’s religious pluralism and officially recognized Calvinism for the first time. But the Catholic victories that had been won at the start of the war were lasting. Protestantism was all but eliminated from large swathes of central Europe. The cost was unspeakable. Germany lost around a third of its entire population, from disease, famine, and the flight of refugees as well as battle deaths.
None of these religious wars produced clear-cut victories. In each case, Catholic forces contained and rolled back Protestantism but failed to eradicate it. One result was that Protestants became convinced that Catholics were blood-soaked murderers who could only ever be fought, never persuaded or converted. Protestants’ ambitions were blunted even as their determination to survive grew more mulish. But the wars also raised more troubling questions about how they themselves dealt with religious dissent.
From the time of Luther’s first clash with the “fanatics”, Protestants had to deal with the problem of error in their midst. For the emerging establishments, this was a war on two fronts. There were the radical dissidents who tended to be lumped together as “Anabaptists”, but there was also the larger problem of what Protestants should do about their neighbours who remained stubbornly Catholic. Between them, these two problems virtually destroyed the inherited concept of how to deal with heresy.
For Protestants to treat Catholics as heretics might seem logical, but it was entirely impractical. There were simply too many of them, and moreover Protestant princes usually wanted to pacify rather than provoke their Catholic neighbours. Even Henry VIII, unmatched in his willingness to put Catholics to death, only once went so far as to burn a Catholic for heresy: an experiment he did not repeat.13 England’s Protestant rulers treated Catholics as political, not religious, offenders. By accepting the pope’s authority, so the argument ran, English Catholics were traitors, serving a foreigner instead of their own natural sovereign. This allowed English monarchs to restrict their anti-Catholic fury to their own subjects and slotted papal loyalists into a convenient preexisting legal category, treason. It also subjected English Catholics to a death at least as horrible as burning, and more humiliating: being hanged, drawn and quartered, an extended torture whose victims eventually died from being hacked to pieces from the belly out. Over two hundred English Catholics were killed this way in the sixteenth century, mostly under Elizabeth I. A few more were allowed a private beheading or deliberately starved to death in prison. Well over a thousand were killed in reprisals for failed rebellions.
No other Protestant state treated Catholicism as a capital crime. Yet Catholics in Protestant countries remained vulnerable to discrimination of all kinds, were routinely forbidden to hold public office or to worship in public, and were subject to penal taxation. England’s official persecution wound down during the seventeenth century, but English anti-Catholic sentiment persisted. An entirely imaginary Catholic conspiracy to assassinate King Charles II triggered widespread panic and at least twenty-two executions between 1678 and 1681. A century later, an attempt to soften anti-Catholic legislation provoked the so-called Gordon Riots, a spasm of anti-Catholic violence across London that destroyed a great deal of Catholic property and left over three hundred people dead, most of them rioters killed by the army.
Anabaptists and radicals seemed more straightforward. Every government loathed them, and there were few enough for traditional anti-heresy techniques to be applied. Some Protestant territories did so – the English, naturally, and also several Swiss cities. But others were more squeamish. Many were reluctant to invoke heresy as a legal category, preferring to dress up their persecution of radicals as self-defence. The idea that Anabaptists posed an existential threat to Protestant establishments may seem risible with hindsight, but early Protestants were primed to see diabolical threats on every side. Anabaptists were naked flames in societies whose sins were tinder dry. They needed to be doused before disaster ensued.
Luther’s approach was to treat Anabaptists as blasphemers rather than as heretics. Blasphemy was a civil rather than a religious crime, which helped Luther evade the charge of hypocrisy for seeking freedom of conscience while prosecuting dissidents. Respectable religion was free; insulting God was not. Most jurisdictions continued to treat blasphemy as a capital crime throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. The English Quaker James Nayler was convicted of blasphemy for restaging Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the outskirts of Bristol in 1656, casting himself in the starring role and claiming that Christ was in him. One admirer wrote, “Thy name is no more to be called James but Jesus.” There was a clamour for his death, which the government only nominally resisted; he was in fact branded, whipped, bored through the tongue, and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. His health broken, he died less than a year after his release.14 The pretence that such prosecutions were not religious persecution was becoming hard to maintain. A Scottish student named Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for blasphemy in 1697, for ridiculing the Bible, calling Christ an impostor, and arguing that “God” was simply another word for nature. The punishment shocked his contemporaries. After him, Britain would execute no more blasphemers.
The alternative was some form of religious toleration. The notion of toleration was a familiar one, but it did not have the idealistic feel that it has in our own age. Errors might be tolerable rather as a minor infestation of vermin is tolerable, because eradicating them would be difficult and costly. The classic argument for toleration was that only God can know believers’ hearts, and persecution produces hypocritical conformity rather than true belief. In other words, enforcing true belief is desirable but impossible. Against this pragmatism stood the principled case for persecution: truth cannot compromise with error, and giving simple Christians freedom to stray from the truth is as foolish as giving a child freedom to play with a razor.
On the face of it, Luther’s defiance of the Church made it hard to justify any form of religious compulsion. In his early enthusiasm, Luther took that view explicitly. His doctrine of the two kingdoms stated that compulsion applied only to worldly matters. He denounced executions of Anabaptists, declaring that “we should allow everyone to believe what he wills”. But this was hardly a respectful pluralism. He added,
Let them preach as confidently and boldly as they are able and against whomever they wish. For, as I have said, there must be sects, and the Word of God must be under arms and fight. . . . Let the spirits collide, and fight it out. If meanwhile some are led astray, all right, such is war.
False believers did not need earthly chastisement, he insisted, because they would be punished in hell. Yes, it was impossible to impose correct belief, but that did not make error any less culpable. And because Luther usually saw Anabaptists as rebels who deserved secular punishment anyway, there was much less to his proclaimed tolerance than met the eye.15
But the idea did not disappear. It would resurface in two streams, one philosophical, the other practical. The fountainhead of the philosophical tradition was Sebastian Castellio, a Protestant refugee in Geneva who fell out bitterly with John Calvin. It was Castellio who made the execution of Miguel Servetus notorious. He argued that it was simply wrong in principle to kill someone for their beliefs, even someone as offensive as Servetus. Castellio’s appeal to freedom of conscience was idiosyncratic in its day, but it was taken up in the seventeenth century and in the 1690s was canonized by two of Protestantism’s greatest philosophers, John Locke and Pierre Bayle.
This tradition is inspiring but had its limits. Castellio famously argued that “to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to kill a man”. Like Luther, he believed that compulsion was wrong, not that freedom of belief was right. He argued, “I must be saved by my own faith and not that of another.” So religious compulsion is futile, but religious error is fatal. It is an oddly callous argument: my neighbor is hurtling towards hell, and I will do nothing about it. Locke’s famous Letter Concerning Toleration is similarly measured. His core argument for religious tolerance is indebted to Luther’s two kingdoms: princes simply do not have authority over their subjects’ souls, because souls are under God’s jurisdiction alone and no earthly power can compel them. But this does not mean an open-ended right to believe whatever you want. Princes can legitimately stamp out opinions that are dangerous to other people – such as Catholicism, the religion of bloodthirsty plots. Likewise, they can persecute atheism, not merely because atheists were assumed to be antisocial monsters, but because they had by definition denied God’s authority over their souls, making it legitimate for princes to step in. The tolerance that Castellio and Locke taught was real, honourable, and costly, but it was a long way from what we would now recognize as genuine religious freedom.16
What gave their ideas increasing traction was the other, more pragmatic stream of Protestant toleration, arising chiefly from the experience of persecution. There was no logical reason why Protestants could not demand religious freedom for themselves while denying it to others. If error has a duty to tolerate truth, truth does not therefore have a duty to tolerate error. In practice, however, because Protestants made so much of tales of Catholic cruelty, it was only natural to try to differentiate themselves from their oppressors.
One dramatic way to do this was simply to refuse to kill people for their beliefs, a principle the Dutch rebels made their own. It was a moral stance but also a prudent one, because it reassured the Netherlands’ wildly plural religious communities that they would be safe under Calvinist rule. When the new Dutch Republic was established in 1581, “freedom of conscience” became one of its guiding principles. Again, it is important to be clear what this “freedom” meant. The Dutch Republic had an established Calvinist church, and non-Calvinists’ civil rights were restricted. Catholics were permitted simply to practice their religion in private, without larger gatherings and certainly without the services of priests. Until 1648, the Dutch were locked in a war of survival against their former Catholic rulers, and Catholics were sometimes the targets of vicious reprisals.
Yet the Netherlands was by the early seventeenth century the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan territory on earth. Any real religious intolerance would be terrible for business. In the 1630s, the city of Amsterdam allowed both Lutherans and Jews to build public places for worship. The freedoms granted to Jews were particularly astonishing at the time, not least to the city’s Jews themselves. Visitors to the city goggled at the synagogue, just as they do today at the red-light district and coffee shops. Not everyone was impressed. The English poet Andrew Marvell wrote:
Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew,
Staple of sects and mint of schism . . .
That bank of conscience, where not one so strange
Opinion but finds credit, and exchange.17
As he insinuated, it was commercial interest rather than principle that had made the rapid growth of Amsterdam’s Jewish community possible. Jews brought lucrative trading links, and they posed no real threat. Like the Lutherans, all of whom were German or Scandinavian, the Jews were understood to be a self-contained community of foreigners. They could be used to demonstrate Dutch tolerance without any risk that they would start winning converts.
Not that the indigenous population was short of choices. Although the Dutch Republic was officially Calvinist, only a minority of the population, perhaps a fifth, were formal members of the Calvinist church. Another third or more were loosely affiliated, attending services and bringing their children to baptism without accepting the discipline that went with full membership. The rest were scattered between all churches and none. Mixed marriages and opportunistic conversions were widespread. One bewildered visitor to the Netherlands in 1618 stayed with a family where the mother and daughter were Calvinist, the father and son Catholic, the grandmother Anabaptist, and the uncle a Jesuit priest.18 The Dutch did not have freedom of religion in the modern sense, and many, even most of them still believed that in principle a Christian society should enjoy religious unity. Even so, the achievement of Dutch religious liberty during the seventeenth century remains astonishing.
Can Protestantism claim that achievement? Certainly no Catholic territory could have managed such a thing. But Protestants neither had set out to achieve this nor were particularly proud of having done so. Protestant pluralism emerged in practice before it was articulated in theory. The principled pursuit of religious unity had taken France to the brink of ruin in the sixteenth century, and Germany over it in the seventeenth. Meanwhile, the Netherlands had become the richest society in the world. The single-minded pursuit of religious unity might have been ideal, but for many people it was better to be rich.
The most obvious Protestant beneficiaries of this policy were the radicals. The watershed moment for Anabaptists was the disaster at Münster in 1534–35, where an apocalyptic, utopian revolution had ended in a mass slaughter. After that, while a few still nursed violent fantasies, most radicals chose different paths. Two alternatives were open to them. One party of post-Münster Anabaptists withdrew into mysticism and into hiding, cutting themselves off from a world from which they expected nothing and to which they owed nothing. They would not fight, but they would deceive, feigning outward conformity while awaiting their deliverance. In 1544, their prophet David Joris moved incognito to the eclectic metropolis of Basel, where he lived out his life, continuing to publish works of mystical piety while remaining anonymous. Only in 1559, three years after his death, was his identity uncovered, at which point his body was exhumed and burned.19
Joris’s exposure sent a thrill of fear around Europe. Who knew how many others remained hidden, binding each other to secrecy with devilish rites? Another mystical sect of Dutch origins, known by the sinister name the Family of Love, sparked a wave of panic in England in the early 1580s precisely because its members were almost impossible to detect. Familists called each other simply by their initials, and so although it eventually became plain that they had friends at Queen Elizabeth’s court, it was impossible to establish the identity of the disciple they called “E.R.”: not, we may assume, the queen herself. Familists conformed outwardly in all things, merely gathering to whisper forbidden doctrines. Movements like this terrified contemporaries, but their very secrecy doomed them to marginal status. It was very hard for underground sects to attract converts at all. They could even die out without anyone noticing that they had gone.20
A different path was chosen by Menno Simons, a Dutch Anabaptist whose Mennonite movement survives to the present. Simons preached pacifism and non-compliance with a positively suicidal integrity. Mennonites quickly became renowned for their readiness to lay down their lives for their faith and their refusal to lift a finger to fight for it. It was this small community, not the more numerous and more timorous mainstream reformers, that provided the bulk of the martyrs of the Dutch persecution. The tale of Dirk Willemsz became iconic. Willemsz escaped from a Catholic prison in the spring of 1569 and fled across a frozen river. He crossed safely, but the ice gave way under the officer who was following him. Willemsz turned back and saved the man’s life by pulling him from the water. As a result, he was rearrested and, eventually, executed. In legal terms, this rigour made sense: he was still an unrepentant heretic. But such stories did not give the law a good name.
The Dutch Republic was content to tolerate Mennonites. Their closed communities were antisocial but not openly subversive. They had scruples about matters like swearing oaths and bearing arms, which took a little goodwill to accommodate politically, but the goodwill was there, greased by the Mennonites’ willingness to pay hefty extra taxes to regularize their status.
The Mennonites’ heroic virtues did not, however, extend to toleration. In the 1550s, they themselves divided bitterly, and by the end of the century there were at least six distinct, mutually reviling Mennonite groups in the Netherlands. The most divisive issue, with painful irony, was how far they ought to tolerate one another. One party, the Waterlanders, rejected the practice of formally excluding or “shunning” those who fell foul of the godly community’s discipline. For this they were duly shunned by the others. They persisted in preaching reunion, and in the 1630s several Mennonite groups drew on Waterlander principles to form a body, the United Congregations, that decided to tolerate differences over minor issues in the faith. Unfortunately, it was unclear what counted as a minor issue. The Waterlanders themselves, who disliked binding rules of any kind, were not actually permitted to join the United Congregations, but by this time the Waterlanders had divisions of their own. In the 1620s, an educated, dissident movement of freethinkers known as the Collegiants had emerged, rejecting all hierarchies and structures and permitting any participant in their informal meetings to speak. The Waterlanders expelled them. The Collegiants themselves, in turn, expelled those who questioned Christ’s divinity. The United Congregations then split over how to deal with the Collegiants. The faction who argued that Collegiants, anti-Trinitarians, and even the unbaptized should be admitted to the Eucharist were eventually expelled in 1664 and sought refuge among the Waterlanders. Naturally, the Waterlanders refused to admit such dangerous spiritual anarchists.21
This farce contains the paradoxes of Protestant tolerance and intolerance in microcosm. It shows Protestants’ endless appetite for squabbling and their widespread conviction that separated brethren remained brethren. It also shows that the most divisive issue of all was tolerance itself. Even so, unwillingly, whether from political positioning, commercial opportunism, the exhaustion of alternatives, or even a degree of principle, Protestantism was by the late seventeenth century slouching toward a grudging, genuine tolerance.
No more than a few thousand religious dissidents were judicially killed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but between 1450 and 1700, and especially between 1550 and 1650, some fifty thousand to a hundred thousand Europeans were put to death for a slightly different religious crime: witchcraft. Around 80 per cent of these were women, whereas roughly 80 per cent of executed heretics were men. The numbers are not vast; more people than that died of the plague in London in one year, 1665. But the slaughter of tens of thousands of women for an imaginary crime is a phenomenon worth noticing.
For centuries, most Europeans had believed in witches: malevolent misfits who used uncanny powers to inflict harm on their neighbours. It was only from the fifteenth century on, however, that witches began to be judicially prosecuted in large numbers. Many jurisdictions now began treating witchcraft as a species of heresy, accusing supposed witches of making pacts with the devil. Petty crimes of personal malice were redefined in apocalyptic terms.
What, if anything, did this have to do with the Reformation? The witch hunts and the wars of religion took place in the same region, in the same period, and invoked the same murderous logic. Yet the two phenomena do not line up neatly, either chronologically or denominationally. Catholics killed more witches than Protestants did, but some Protestant witch-hunters worked very hard to stay competitive, and some Catholic territories, such as Spain, prosecuted very few witches. Protestants and Catholics read each other’s anti-witchcraft treatises and competed to prove their zeal.
One key connection, however, has been made by the work of the historian Gary K. Waite. Witches were not alone in attracting both Catholic and Protestant persecutors; so did Anabaptists, who were often described as devilish, for their doctrines, their behaviour, and their infuriating steadfastness under torture. One group of southern German Anabaptists, arrested in 1532, sang, laughed, barked, and brayed so that it sounded as if “the prison was full of devils”. Or again, in February 1535, during the height of the Münster crisis, a group of Anabaptists (seven men, four women) burned their clothes in an upper room in Amsterdam and ran out naked into the street, proclaiming woe and claiming to be preaching “the naked truth”. When forcibly dressed after their arrest, they tore their clothes from their bodies. Clothes had first been donned by Adam and Eve as a sign of sin, to conceal their shame. By shedding their clothes, the Amsterdam nudists proclaimed that they had overcome sin. At the same time, their nudity symbolically revealed and denounced the corruption that their godless neighbours had concealed under their fine clothing. To those appalled neighbours, this looked demonic. The Amsterdam nudists were discharged, but Anabaptists, sexual deviants, and demons were mixing together in people’s minds. Two years later, a Dutch Anabaptist was burned as a witch. In the records, her crime was initially given as adult baptism, but that was scratched out and replaced with witchcraft.22
The leap from anti-Anabaptist paranoia to witch panic was easy. Anabaptists’ secrecy seemed diabolical; David Joris’s success in hiding among honest Christians was blamed on sorcery. Joris had in fact taught that there was no devil, but because the standard judicial view was that only witches deny the devil’s existence, this hardly helped. Some radicals also questioned conventional sexual mores, even beyond nudity or permitting women to teach. One Thuringian sect, the Bloodfriends, supposedly taught total sexual freedom for the saved. Their secret outdoor meetings were said to end with the command “be fruitful and multiply”, whereupon they paired off. Such deliciously appalling tales were widely told. One French gentleman, arrested in 1562 for attending a secret Protestant meeting, shamefacedly explained that he had gone along because he had hoped, vainly, that the rumours of orgies were true. The judges dismissed his case, our witness tells us, “trying not to laugh”. Not everyone thought it was funny. A sectarian orgy is not too different from a witches’ sabbath.23
Worst of all was the Anabaptists’ refusal to baptize infants and their insistence that converts who had been baptized as infants be rebaptized. Catholic and Lutheran baptisms included a formal exorcism, casting the devil out of a child born in original sin. Anabaptism could be construed as a demonic scheme to fill the world with unbaptized slaves of the devil. Everyone knew that witches’ sabbaths involved sacrificing, and indeed eating, unbaptized babies. Suspicion came to focus on midwives, who were suspected both of concealing Anabaptists’ babies so as to avoid baptism and also of witchcraft, especially when babies died suddenly. Adult baptisms only made matters worse, because the sabbath legend also held that the devil forced witches to renounce Christian baptism and to accept a foully diabolical baptism, with new devil-parents instead of godparents (see plate).
By the 1550s, the categories of “witch” and “Anabaptist” were becoming blurred. In the Lutheran territory of Baden, church authorities asked each parish in 1556 whether they were troubled by “Anabaptists, sorcerers, necromancers, or similar people”. In Wiesensteig, in southwestern Germany, a secret Anabaptist group was discovered meeting by night in the summer of 1562. Weeks later, a freak summer hailstorm did terrible damage to crops in the area, and twenty women were arrested as witches, accused both of causing the storm and of having robbed children of their baptism. They were burned en masse, and at least forty more executions followed over the next few months. This was overseen by the local lord, Count Ulrich of Helfenstein, who had reconverted to Catholicism after brief flirtations with Lutheranism and a moderate strain of Anabaptism.24
This was the period’s first truly mass witch panic. From then on, persecution of Anabaptists began to dry up, to be replaced by much larger-scale persecution of witches, in more or less the same areas. Fears of secret but real sects had metastasized into fears of invented ones. Tales of witches’ crimes become as florid as each individual prosecutor’s fantasies. Protestants and Catholics, having competed to stamp out one satanic sect, easily transferred their rivalry to the new target.
Protestants were deeply implicated in these killings. But in this as in almost everything else, they did not speak with one voice. Most assumed that witches were servants of the devil and fully deserved death, quoting Exodus 22:18 to prove the point: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” A few, however, questioned whether it was correct to translate the Hebrew word kashaph as “witch”. Reginald Scot, an English witch sceptic who might himself have had ties to the Family of Love, reckoned it meant “poisoner”. Scot dismissed claims about old women’s magical powers as superstition, insisting that the devil himself had been defeated by Christ and could do no more than spread lies.25
Scot was unique in his excoriating rationalism but not in his qualms about witch-hunting. The Dutch-born Lutheran physician Johann Weyer and the English preacher George Gifford did not question the devil’s power, but both argued that most of the women accused of witchcraft were innocent, either accused out of malice or imagining themselves to be witches when they were not. By the mid-seventeenth century, there was widespread unease with the mismatch between the diabolical conspirators whom advocates of witch-hunting described and the pathetic wretches who were in fact dragged before most courts. Judicial persecution of witches quietly tailed away to nothing. The age’s most notorious witch hunt, at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, was virtually the last of its kind. It may be significant that Massachusetts had reacted exceptionally violently to the appearance in the 1650s of the Quakers, the Anabaptists of their day: New England Quakers were frequently accused of witchcraft. Regardless, the Salem trials were remarkable chiefly for the near-universal disapproval they provoked.
Whether they were dealing with Catholics, radicals, or witches, Protestants could kill in the name of religion with a zeal that was second to none. They could also disagree with one another vigorously about doing so and could shift their ground with remarkable speed and flexibility. That combination of implacable fervour, conscientious stubbornness, and willingness suddenly to abandon and to repent of their old views is one of Protestants’ most distinctive hallmarks.
