Читать книгу Reformation - Harry Reid - Страница 14

Оглавление

The Key Players

John Calvin

Less impetuous, less exhilarating than Luther, but possessed of an orderly, lucid lawyer’s mind and a strong, stern will, he masterminded the second phase of the movement that Luther so explosively began. He will always be associated with Geneva (to this day, his imprint is very clear on the old town up the hill from the lake). He was initially reluctant to undertake his ministry there, and was at times immensely unpopular with some of the citizens. But, despite appalling ill-health, he prevailed, and he created in the city state an impressive, if also repressive, democratic theocracy.

History has not been particularly generous to him; he is remembered more for the grimness of aspects of his theology and for his persistent emphasis on social discipline than for his decency and even warmth as a pastor. His teachings and his sermons are full of wisdom and sensible guidance on how to live; he was a kinder and more humane man, and far less of a fanatic, than his many detractors would have us believe, though he undoubtedly had his fierce side. Knox admired him enormously but was not greatly influenced by him.

Calvin always pined for his native France, from which he fled as a young man and to which he never managed to return.

Catherine de Medici

A scheming and duplicitous Florentine, she exercised in various roles – queen, queen mother, regent – a powerful but malign influence over the affairs of France in the latter part of the sixteenth century. A complex figure, she did at times try to pursue religious moderation and toleration, but her main drive was her dynastic ambition, and she could never resist political intrigue. She was certainly not good news for France, or for Protestantism.

She was deeply implicated in the protracted atrocity of the Massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572, during which many thousands of French Huguenots – French Protestants – were slaughtered in especially vile circumstances. Despite this, commemorative medals of celebration were struck in Rome.

William Cecil

Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister. A curious mixture of boldness and caution, he lay low during the bloody reign of Mary Tudor. One of Elizabeth’s first significant acts as queen was to appoint him as her principal adviser, and he rapidly embarked on an ambitious and daring pro-Protestant foreign policy.

It was Cecil who advised Elizabeth to send her army and navy north to drive the French out of Scotland. The final decision was Elizabeth’s and hers alone, but it was Cecil who persuaded her, despite the many inherent risks, that it was the right thing to do.

Later, he consistently argued for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots; here, Elizabeth took much longer to heed his sage advice.

Emperor Charles V

The last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned by the pope, he was elected emperor in 1519. His enemies were numerous and powerful – Suleiman the Magnificent, the French, the Protestants and occasionally even the papacy. He won a huge victory over the considerable Protestant forces of Germany at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547, but typically was unable to follow it up. His imperial legacy was to be the growing disunity of Christendom. Recognising this, he resigned in 1556 and split his huge territories between his two sons, the ineffective Philip of Spain and Ferdinand, who became the new emperor.

An earnest and decent man, Charles could not always control his own troops, who were sometimes little more than a feral rabble. The nadir of his imperial rule came in 1527 when his army, unpaid, leaderless and mutinous, sacked Rome in an extended and appalling orgy of rape, looting, vandalism and murder as Pope Clement VII cowered in the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer

Cautious, diplomatic, adaptable, he was the supreme liturgist of the careful compromise that was the Anglican Reformation settlement. Unfortunately, he was executed by ‘Bloody Mary’ Tudor, and so he did not live to see the fruits of his life’s work in the Anglican Church which Elizabeth rapidly established when she became queen a few years later.

A countryman at heart, he was also a notable secular statesman. His crowning achievement was the beautiful Anglican Book of Common Prayer. His mastery of English prose, and his contribution to English cultural as well as religious identity, were second only to Tyndale’s.

Queen Elizabeth I of England

Wayward, vulgar, deceitful, secretive, vain, flighty, bossy, spiteful and chronically indecisive, she was frequently insufferable. One of her ministers described her as a base bastard pissing kitchen woman. She never married and was often lonely, her loneliness accentuated by her office. She was also ferociously intelligent, witty, kind, exceptionally well informed and, above all, courageous. She reigned long and well. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed by her father, the monstrous Henry VIII; and generally she did not like executing people, though she knew that she had to from time to time.

In the second year of her reign, when she was just 26, she bravely decided, after long agonising, to defy the great powers of France and Spain and send her army and navy north to help the Scots drive the French out of their country and thus secure the Scottish Reformation. This was the most important decision of her reign and probably the most important decision in Scottish history. It finally ended centuries of hostility and led to centuries of peace.

She was the supreme star in a century of glittering European monarchs, and her allure is somehow still alive to this day.

Henry VII of England

The founder of the Tudor dynasty, he was a cautious and notably pious king who slowly but surely restored peace to England, which had been ravaged for generations by the civil Wars of the Roses. Although he won his crown in battle, he was a peace-loving man, and he believed in using marriage as a means to diplomatic and political ends. Thus he, a Lancastrian, married Elizabeth of York, merging the white and red roses into a kind of peaceful pink; he married his heir Arthur to Catherine of Aragon in an attempt to secure a long-standing peace with Spain, and he married his daughter Margaret to James IV of Scotland, a visionary piece of dynastic manoeuvring that eventually, several generations later, led to the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland.

He was an exemplary Roman Catholic and a successful king. He is the subject of the best biography in the English language, by Sir Francis Bacon; but unfortunately his thuggish younger son, who became Henry VIII, is more remembered and more celebrated.

Henry VIII of England

A wicked and duplicitous psychopath, he presided over the English Reformation, which was initially driven not by spiritual aspirations but rather by the king’s complicated and tedious matrimonial difficulties. He married six times and executed two of his wives. He treated them all abominably, with the possible exception of the last, the estimable Catherine Parr.

He surrounded himself with some of the most gifted Englishmen of all time, including the four Thomases: the precocious lawyer Thomas Cromwell, who drafted much of the far-sighted legislation that enacted the early English Reformation; Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, his first great servant; Sir Thomas More, his Lord Chancellor and the eloquent conscience of early Catholic resistance to Henry’s Reformation; and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, a liturgist of exceptional brilliance.

Cromwell and More were both executed by the tyrant; Wolsey would have been, had he not managed to die first. Cranmer, on the other hand, outlasted the old rogue. Indeed, he ministered to the bloated monster as he lay dying; and this deathbed scene has an unlikely poignancy. Henry’s great achievement was to father Elizabeth, who was to become a splendid and glorious monarch.

James IV, King of Scots

Bumptious, puffed up, grandiose, he had an ambition to strut the wider European stage – and, unusually for a Scottish monarch, he almost succeeded. He could not read his times; he wanted to lead a new crusade, and he created an impressive navy, but then he led his country to its worst-ever military debacle (and there were quite a few over the years) in an inland battle. A persistent, serial womaniser, his relations with his wife Margaret Tudor were never of the best; but their marriage paved the way for the eventual Union of the Crowns.

James was dashing, generous and clever. He maintained a splendid court. Physically strong and resilient, he ruled his unruly kingdom energetically, but he was inconsistent. His relations with England were ill-judged; despite his marriage, he generally leaned towards France. In religion, he was orthodox; and, like his father-in-law Henry Tudor, he evinced no anticipation whatsoever of the tumult that was about to sweep across Europe.

He is sometimes regarded as the greatest of Scots monarchs; if that is the case, it merely shows the poverty of the general standard of Scottish kingship.

James VI, King of Scots – and King James I of England

He was desperate to become king of England from an early age, and this is perhaps why he evinced little public anger or even disapproval when Queen Elizabeth had his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, executed.

Henry VIII tried to effect the Union of the Crowns by vicious force; James, to his credit, accomplished the union peacefully, in 1603. Thereafter, he mostly ignored his northern kingdom. He was clever, and all too aware of it; he loved lecturing clerics, and he particularly liked showing off before his English Parliament, which responded by becoming ever more truculent and disputatious. He deserves credit for commissioning the Authorised Version of the Bible. He deserves less credit for the disgraceful tract he wrote against witches, which gave royal imprimatur to a frenzy of witch-hunting in Scotland.

John Knox

The guiding genius of the Scottish Reformation was a self-styled prophet, a fiery preacher, a genuine democrat and a consistent Anglophile. Indeed, he was offered an English bishopric long before he returned to his native country to mastermind what was, to some extent, a social and political as well as a religious revolution.

He learned much from Calvin during his time in Geneva, yet he was never a zealous follower of the Frenchman; for example, he was much more radical in his belief in the legitimacy of revolt against tyrants.

Knox was emphatically not the killjoy of popular caricature. Despite his ill-advised ‘blast of the trumpet’ against rule by women, he was always something of a ladies’ man. He appreciated wine and good fellowship. His own account of the Scottish Reformation, while self-serving, is at times great fun. He was a social as well as a religious visionary, and the blueprint that he and five colleagues drew up for the new Scotland was centuries ahead of its time in its democratic integrity and its emphasis on education and social welfare.

Saint Ignatius Loyola

This Basque nobleman started as a soldier, and it was during his long agony as he recovered from a terrible wound received while defending Pamplona against the French – and two subsequent botched operations – that he discovered his inner spirituality and his need to serve Christ. His idea of service was based on supreme obedience.

Like so many of the outstanding figures of the sixteenth century, he was complex and contradictory. A tough man with an iron will, he was also highly sensitive and something of a mystic. He possessed a potent imagination. His celebrated Spiritual Exercises, still much used, rely above all on the intensive exercise of imagination.

Central to his teaching was the need for total obedience to the Church, the bride of Christ. The great order he founded, the Jesuits, were to be the shock troops of the huge fightback that is generally called the Counter-Reformation. Himself diamond-hard and ascetic, he nonetheless allowed the elite order he founded to be sinewy and subtle, to keep adjusting to the times.

Martin Luther

A stubborn man of peasant stock, and also a spiritual genius, Luther was very clever but had little subtlety and less sophistication. He was both the most influential evangelical and the most effective revolutionary in European history. A writer of superhuman productivity and a communicator of genius, he could not always control his pen. Some of what he wrote was vicious and vile. He was guilty of anti-Semitism, and at times he wrote savagely and violently in defence of the status quo. This makes his colossal contribution to the cause of change and the development of individual liberty all the more astounding. He could be boorish and foul-mouthed. He was excessively contentious and constantly divisive.

One of the multiple paradoxes of the sixteenth century was that this conservative man should have inspired momentous, continuing revolution; the movement he started in 1517 led to unimagined upheaval and the transfer of power and property on an enormous scale.

Although he resiled somewhat in his later years, the implication of his early teaching, with its supreme emphasis on faith and his notion of ‘the priesthood of all believers’, was that the Church was in effect redundant. All Christians were to be subject to each other, not some vast hierarchical structure. Supremely, he persuaded people to think for themselves. He ended the dark ages of the mind. He unleashed an enormous surge of popular education. He was arguably not just the greatest German, but also the greatest European.

Mary of Guise

Many people tried to rule Scotland, a turbulent and contrary nation, in the sixteenth century; Mary of Guise, a beautiful and charming French noblewoman, succeeded better than most. She was married to James V, King of Scots, from 1538 to 1542. A few years later, she came into her own. Unlike her ill-starred daughter Mary Queen of Scots, she showed sensitivity to the Scots and their affairs, and she steered a careful and skilful political course until the Scottish Reformation finally got under way. At this point, she started to panic and lost control.

She was a devout Catholic – but, unlike her namesake and contemporary in England, Mary Tudor, she did not make martyrs of Protestants. On the contrary, she actually allowed English Protestant refugees to find shelter and sanctuary in Scotland.

Mary Queen of Scots

Quite simply, the wrong queen at the wrong time. Bewitching and ardent, she sadly left the sophisticated French court; and, after a most difficult, stormy sea journey, she arrived in the bleak northern country she was to rule so disastrously – just when the weather was at its worst. John Knox, who was to harangue her with insolent but splendidly democratic confidence, noted with relish that the portents were bad from the very start.

At first, like her distinguished mother Mary of Guise, she managed to rule with some tact and sensitivity; but she simply could not understand that she had arrived in the midst of religious and social revolution.

Her taste in men was degraded; she indulged the frivolous Italian plotter David Rizzio, her so-called secretary, who was murdered by the loutish pals of her second husband, the bisexual wastrel Henry Darnley (by whom she produced the boy who was to become James VI and I). Then, when Darnley had been literally blown up (an atrocious crime in which she was surely complicit), she married the rapist, thug and sociopath Bothwell.

After unsuccessfully defying her own people, she threw herself on the mercy of Queen Elizabeth south of the Border, thus becoming history’s ultimate unwanted guest. Most of England wanted her dead, particularly when she stupidly and treacherously got involved in plots against her host; yet Elizabeth defied her advisers, and it was many years until she made the fateful decision.

And so, Mary was at last executed in a forlorn Northamptonshire castle. England rejoiced; bonfires were lit, bells rang across the land, and the celebrations continued for days. As for Elizabeth, she wept uncontrollably. Then she recovered and went on to preside over the defeat of the Spanish armada.

‘Bloody’ Mary Tudor, Queen of England

Mary has had a bad press, not least from Protestant propagandists infuriated by her enthusiastic burning of those whom she regarded as heretics. She is still known by the unkind but valid soubriquet of ‘Bloody Mary’. She executed nearly 300 Protestants, many of whom became celebrated martyrs. The policy was counter-productive, particularly because so many of those who were killed, including the leading churchmen Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Hooper, died so well and courageously. Although most of her subjects probably remained Catholics, Mary could not capitalise on this. Her controversial marriage to Philip II of Spain achieved little. Compared to her half-sister Elizabeth, who succeeded her, she was a poor monarch and indeed a total failure.

But she had a rotten life. She had seen her dignified mother, Catherine of Aragon, humiliated by her father, the brutish Henry VIII. She herself was declared a bastard. Her marriage to Philip was blighted by her inability to produce a child. As she was growing up, she showed a propensity to be fun-loving. She enjoyed gambling and adored fine clothes and jewellery. Slowly, grimly, dourness and duty took over.

Andrew Melville

A clever, cultured and cosmopolitan man from Angus, Melville played the part of Calvin to Knox’s Luther: he organised the second phase of the Scottish Reformation and gave it intellectual solidity. Like Knox, he was a democrat and was not afraid to harangue his monarch, in this case James VI. He outdid James in debate, and also insulted him, calling him ‘God’s silly vassal’. He eventually paid for his impudence when James had him imprisoned in London.

A brilliant intellectual, he accomplished much at Glasgow University, of which he was principal. He was a rigorous Presbyterian, and it was mainly thanks to him that Scotland became a firmly Presbyterian nation.

Pope Paul IV

The first and lesser of the two great Counter-Reformation Puritan popes, the Neapolitan Gian Pietro Caraffa at last became pope at the grand old age of 79. Personally fearless, he was a ferocious and tyrannical figure. He despised the Council of Trent, the great engine of Catholic reform. He preferred the Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books. He detested Spaniards almost as much as he hated Protestants. He held the Holy Roman Emperor in contempt.

He was probably slightly mad. But he succeeded in cleaning Rome up, driving out prostitutes and gangsters, bandits and beggars. In his severe personal asceticism, his refusal to compromise, and his resolute war on venality, corruption and softness, he could not have been more removed from the frivolous and decadent Renaissance popes whose disgraceful, self-indulgent antics had exacerbated the crisis in the old Church at the very time when pressure for reform was stirring.

Philip II of Spain

The son of Emperor Charles V, Philip II of Spain was a poor leader and constantly betrayed his avowed cause of Catholicism. Somehow he managed to bankrupt Spain, which should have been the wealthiest power in the world. He constantly failed, not just financially but also militarily. His most celebrated defeat was by the English, when the grand armada of 1588 was scattered (with considerable help from the weather). He also managed to lose most of his Dutch colonies after years of debilitating conflict.

He was briefly married to Queen Mary Tudor of England. He never trusted his generals; and, for the most part, he was ill-served by them. He abjectly failed in his mission to stamp out heresy in Western Europe. His incompetence rendered him, paradoxically, a good friend of Protestantism.

Pope Saint Pius V

Arguably the greatest pope in a turbulent and momentous century, Michele Ghislieri was the second of the outstanding Puritan popes. A former shepherd, he was a very clean-living Dominican who steadily worked his way through various offices – including that of inquisitor general. Here he incurred the wrath of Caraffa, who thought he was too soft. Nonetheless, he carried on Caraffa’s tradition of austerity and fierceness, but he mingled it with a leavening of compassion. He controversially excommunicated Queen Elizabeth of England.

He completed Caraffa’s work by finally turning Rome, for most of the sixteenth century second only to Paris as a centre of decadence, into a clean and even monastic city. The later masters of the high baroque, such as Gianlorenzo Bernini, adorned Rome with gorgeous sensual art yet did not destroy the city’s new spirituality.

Pius V made the eternal city a fitting place of pilgrimage. He also turned the office of pope into what it surely should be, that of a priest, a pastor and a cleric rather than a worldly potentate (despite his part in gathering the vast navy that finally defeated the Turks at Lepanto).

He has been accused of political naivety, yet he had the foresight and the wisdom to put the main decisions of the long-standing Council of Trent into effect; and this was a political as much as a spiritual process. He published the all-important catechism which codified the long work of Trent. He relied overmuch on the Inquisition, and he was not averse to using cruelty and torture when he deemed it necessary. But he cleansed Rome, he cleansed the papacy, and overall he was a good man. Arguably the most significant Catholic figure of the sixteenth century after Loyola, he was much later (in 1712) canonised.

Girolamo Savonarola

A Dominican who was a preacher of raw power, Savonarola was a terrifying enemy of frivolity, immorality, corruption, showy wealth and the abuse of clerical office. Determined to cleanse and renew the mercenary Church, he was the most notable of the ‘outriders’, the various anticipators of the Reformation.

For a time, he held total sway over the republic of Florence, preaching in a way that put fear into some (including Michelangelo) and inspired others. He organised the celebrated ‘bonfires of the vanities’. All this was too much for the papacy; after a mockery of a trial, he was burned to death.

Suleiman the Magnificent

Ottoman sultan and warlord, his sultanate of forty-six years was crucial in that it diverted the forces that might well have otherwise crushed the Reformation. Suleiman led from the front. He was one of the most adept practitioners of the grisly art of war that the world has ever known, and he rampaged around vast tracts of Eastern Europe, posing a constant threat to the security of the West in general and the Holy Roman Empire in particular. For example, in a hard-fought battle in 1526, his cavalry utterly routed the massed armies of Hungary, leaving around 18,000 slaughtered in the field, including the king and many of his nobles.

Suleiman was even stronger in the Mediterranean, and his mastery of that sea allowed him to move with impunity through North Africa and much of the Middle East. He was indeed magnificent: he was a great legislator and a distinguished patron of the arts as well as a fearsome generalissimo. In Western Europe, popes, princes, emperors, queens and kings were all deeply afraid of him.

Five years after he died in 1566, the papacy at last managed to gather the military forces of Roman Catholic Christendom, and they defeated the Turks in the huge set-piece sea battle of Lepanto.

Suleiman’s role in the history of the Reformation may be peripheral, but it is highly significant nonetheless.

William Tyndale

A scholar, linguist and translator of unsurpassed genius, his mastery of the English language was consummate. The first person to translate the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into English, he did so in prose which is accessible, supple, beautiful, numinous and noble. His rhythms and cadences are with us to this day. Few literary scholars manage to make a major contribution to a social, political and religious revolution, but this is precisely what Tyndale did.

His The Obedience of a Christian Man is one of the most underestimated books in our language. His influence on the thinking, literature and religion of English-speaking people can hardly be overstated.

Born in Gloucestershire and educated at Oxford, he travelled widely on the continent in the 1520s, staying in Hamburg and Cologne, and in Luther’s Wittenberg. He was something of a loner, and valued his independence. He does not seem to have been particularly pleasant in his personal dealings. Betrayed by an Englishman called Phillips when he was living covertly in Antwerp, he was arrested by the authorities, imprisoned for heresy, and then strangled and burnt to death.

Huldrych Zwingli

A leading Swiss reformer, who dominated the important city of Zurich in the 1520s, Zwingli was highly sexed, charismatic and a theatrically powerful preacher. His short but influential career as a reformer indicated the essentially fissile nature of Protestantism; he was much alarmed by the growth of radical Anabaptism in Zurich, and he fell out with Luther in a nasty, extended spat over what happened at communion. The way the two men abused each other in a series of polemical tracts ended whatever brief hopes there had been that Protestantism might be a united movement.

Zwingli was killed in combat, wielding his battleaxe, as he fought the army of the Catholic cantons of Switzerland.

Reformation

Подняться наверх