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Introduction

THIS is an intensely dramatic story. It is the story of extraordinary courage, of martyrs, of burnings and persecution, of danger and escape, of degradation and wickedness, of superhuman heroism, of felicity and nobility, of betrayal and treachery, of the destruction of much that was precious and beautiful, of constant, unremitting and often incomprehensible change, of fervent spiritual yearning, of warfare and strife, of social renewal and visionary democratic innovation. It is in part the story of the beginning of the modern world. And that itself, paradoxically, is just the beginning of it. Most of all, this is about the Christian quest for God.

Many people still regard the European Reformation as an unmitigated disaster which led to division and secularisation. Others regard it as the most positive movement in world history, a movement that led to the opening of the minds of ordinary people and set them free from the forces of medieval darkness. Still more find in it the seeds of modern capitalism, or modern decadence, or both. The Reformation divided, and it still divides.

There is peace and piety to be found in this story, but perhaps not enough of either. One thing is clear: our story is supremely one of turbulence and uproar. Its great begetter, a beer-swilling, boorish German peasant who, in his own words, was just ‘an uncivilised fellow from the backwoods’, was also, despite himself, a brilliant revolutionary – possibly the most effective revolutionary in human history. This man, Martin Luther, felt himself constantly ‘impelled by God into the midst of uproar’. This is the story of the Great Uproar.

Our story begins not with Martin Luther but with a man winning the crown of England in battle. His name was Henry Tudor. He was determined to have his royal legitimacy endorsed by the highest authority available: the pope, his ‘Vicar on Earth’. When Pope Innocent VIII duly confirmed Henry Tudor as Henry VII, the rightful king of England, he was ensuring among other things that the new monarch would have the loyalty of the English clergy, of whom there were many (far too many). This was important for Henry because the senior clergy controlled much of the land of England and exercised considerable political power.

Henry VII proved to be a most pious king, though his piety was at times stagey and used for secular purposes. He went on many pilgrimages, but his principal work of devotion was the building of an extravagant and gorgeous monument to himself, the Lady Chapel at the east side of Westminster Abbey. Thousands of people visit it every week of every year; it is the most elaborate and complex part of this famous building. The chapel was to be his own resting place, the magnificent site of his tomb, as well as a shrine to his predecessor Henry VI.

Henry VII was a peace-loving man, although he won his crown in the battle at Bosworth Field in 1485. He managed to end the Wars of the Roses, the vicious dynastic squabbles that had bedevilled England for many years. But, two years later, his army had to win a hard-fought and very bloody battle to preserve his kingship. This battle is described in some detail in this book, partly because it is important to emphasise that countries like England and Scotland were not peaceful places before the Reformation.

Critics of the Reformation often insist that it led to pervasive strife and many wars. There is some truth in this – but, on the other hand, the condition of pre-Reformation Europe was hardly peaceful or stable. The worst disaster in Scottish history, the terrible military catastrophe of Flodden Field, took place in 1513, a few years before the first stirrings of religious reform were felt in Scotland. At Flodden, James IV, King of Scots, died. He was one of the most powerful and charismatic of Scotland’s kings, and latterly his kingly obsession had been his desire to persuade the pope to undertake a new crusade. Rather presumptuously, James wanted to lead the navy of Venice against the Turks. The popes themselves were monarchs of a kind, ruling a large swathe of central Italy. Some of them were also warriors, notably Pope Julius II, who was however wary of James IV’s grandiose plans for a new crusade.

This, then, was the late medieval world: kingship was everything. The eminent Tudor historian David Starkey has emphasised that this was indeed a king-centred world. These kings were ‘the be-all and end-all of imagination and fact’.

Our story is partly about the smashing of kingly authority. The great figures in it are not kings, or queens, but men of humble birth, most notably a German, a Frenchman and a Scot: Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox. They created a new order (or, in some respects, a disorder) in which kingly authority was to be seriously diminished.

Even the most accomplished and glittering monarch of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth of England, found that she had to endure more and more truculent and offensive challenges from religiously motivated Puritans who did not respect her office. In Scotland, Knox harangued his monarch, Mary Queen of Scots, with insolent confidence. And Mary’s son James VI was lectured in a hectoring manner, and very firmly put in his place, by the first great Scots Presbyterian, Andrew Melville. The Scottish Reformation was largely driven by demotic notions. It was one of the later European reformations – after some false starts, it began properly only when John Knox returned to Scotland in 1559 – and it should be regarded as a political and social as well as a religious revolution.

The Scots reformers, led by Knox, had a visionary determination to place education at the very heart of their revolution. This education was to be democratic; the sons of the laird’s servants were to receive just as good and thorough schooling as the sons of the laird.

There were many European reformations, and the first and most crucial one was German. The catch-all singular word ‘Reformation’ is nevertheless valid. This overall Reformation was a movement which encompassed immense national and even regional differences, and covers a series of diverse and separate reformations.

The Reformation movement – which the likes of Henry VII of England and James IV of Scotland, strong traditional Christian monarchs of the early sixteenth century, could not have dreamed of, let alone begun to understand – was unleashed by a coarse and obscure German Augustinian monk called Martin Luther. Coarse he undoubtedly was, and remained. But the obscurity vanished almost overnight. Luther was one of the few surpassing geniuses of human history, and a writer of unparalleled power. The process which he started in 1517 gained momentum with terrifying speed. He could not control it.

A man of stupendous energy, Luther smashed his way on to the European stage and changed everything. His detractors might say he simply smashed everything to bits, though there was much that was positive and creative in his legacy. He was, however, a diligent destroyer. He shook up a continent on which the Church was the greatest landowner, where more than 10 per cent of the population were clerics, and where the pope had political as well as spiritual power and influence.

Religious life before Luther appealed to the senses rather than the mind; the people’s year was punctuated by saints’ days and religious holidays that brought pageantry, colour and fun into otherwise bleak and grim lives. The plague was never far away. There was much fear and much warfare; life was chancy and insecure. Amid life, death was ever-present. People spent much of their time praying for the dead.

A man who somehow combined authentic humility and explosive arrogance, Luther was never the friend of peace and quiet. For the briefest of moments, he might have been dismissed as just another medieval prophet making lonely if eloquent criticisms of the corruption of the Church. But it rapidly became clear that he was special – and, as a threat to the established order across Europe, toxic.

Luther must always be the first and greatest figure of the Reformation. His crucial notion was that every individual should have the right to read and interpret the Bible for him- or herself. This, like the parallel notion of the priesthood of all believers, was an incredible idea; taken to its logical conclusion, it would have destroyed the need for any kind of Church at all: it would have made all clergy superfluous.

Whatever his faults – and there were many, not least his detestation of Jews – Luther was the supreme exponent of reform. He was in many ways the perfect revolutionary. This is one of his manifold paradoxes – for, in persona and background, he was essentially a conservative peasant, if an exceptionally clever one. A deeply spiritual man, he always spent a lot of time praying. He was also a journalist, a propagandist, a preacher, a pamphleteer, a writer of tracts and hymns and polemics, and above all a brilliant translator of the Bible. Millions of words poured from his pen in a furious torrent. As a wordsmith, Luther was both crazed and sublime. He was one of the most prodigious communicators in human history. And of course he availed himself of the crucial new invention, the printing press.

This mysterious and heroic man is desperately difficult to assess and understand even today – but it is essential to try to understand him, for he is the key to our story.

Luther was a kind of divine disrupter. After him came John Calvin, a colder man, the supreme organiser, a lawyer and theologian possessed of a rigorous mind and a controlled, lucid prose style. Towards the end of his tumultuous life, Luther became somewhat self-indulgent; but Calvin maintained the discipline that was so dear to his bleak soul, and drove himself to superhuman limits to the very end. He gave Luther’s erratic and shapeless Reformation form and order. He took a great river in spate and directed it into a more orderly channel, narrower and deeper. He created in Geneva one of the most remarkable religious communities that has ever been known. And he in turn influenced the redoubtable Scottish reformer John Knox, who was to preside over what was probably the most complete European reformation, even though it accomplished nothing like what Knox himself hoped for.

Significantly, Luther, Calvin and Knox were all born in comparative obscurity. But they shook the established order to its foundations. They took on the great and the good of their day with a zest that was genuinely revolutionary. At the same time, their attitude to secular authority was often ambivalent.

Despite the influence and effect of these momentous reformers, kings and queens and princes and popes remained important throughout the sixteenth century. Henry VII’s son Henry VIII, a duplicitous and bloodthirsty tyrant who has legitimately been compared to Stalin, nonetheless personally ushered in the English Reformation – an extraordinary process that was born not out of religious conviction but rather out of tedious matrimonial difficulties. So, in the words of Professor Andrew McGowan, the English Reformation was from the top down. The Scottish Reformation, in contrast, was against the country’s monarchy, not through it. It was from the bottom up. Having said that, it is important to remember that Scotland’s Reformation was achieved with the indispensable help of a foreign queen, Elizabeth of England.

The English Reformation was unique. At first a legal and political rather than a religious settlement, it was the creation of a wife-slaying despot. It became a very English compromise, a sort of ecclesiastical middle way.

There were no outstanding female reformers – but, because queens were just as important as kings, women have a large part to play in our story. Queen Elizabeth of England was one of the greatest monarchs of all time, and it was she who very bravely and provocatively, at the beginning of her long reign, sent her army and navy north to Scotland to secure the Scottish Reformation. Unfortunately, Mary Queen of Scots did not understand, and could not cope with, the early Scottish Reformation. She is sometimes presented as a tragic figure, though that is not the verdict of this book. A genuinely tragic figure was Lady Jane Grey, very briefly queen of England, who has a minor and pitiful role in our story. Then there was Mary of Guise, the mother of Mary Queen of Scots, who was to rule Scotland with some skill and sensitivity, and who altogether showed a grasp of Scottish politics (and to some extent religion) that proved to be quite beyond her daughter.

In the short term, it has to be admitted that the Reformation was not necessarily good for Europe’s women. Places of refuge (and of partial freedom from male control), such as the cloister and the nunnery, were often destroyed. The clergy were allowed to marry, and many women who had been or would have been nuns became subject to male domination, which was not always benign. In some ways, women were liberated; in others, they became liable to potentially brutal domestic control, with no escape. A little later, there was to be wicked and sustained persecution of so-called witches, not least in Scotland, where King James VI lent his spurious intellectual imprimatur to the craze for witch-hunts. More of these supposed witches – most of them wholly innocent old women – were killed in Europe by Catholics than by Protestants; but, in the later stages of the Reformation, there was a terrible zeal for hunting down vulnerable old women and killing them.

Then there were the popes. Some of the Renaissance popes were disgraceful figures who took venality and immorality to obscene and barely credible levels. Some of them were warriors as much as religious leaders, notably the ever-bellicose Julius II. The most hapless popes were poor Leo X and then Clement VII. The latter simply could not deal with the blustering and bullying Henry VIII, and so he must take at least some of the blame, or credit, for the English Reformation. Clement also suffered the grotesque humiliation of the Sack of Rome in 1527, when the troops of a great Catholic potentate, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, breached the inadequate defences of Rome and then subjected the eternal city to a horrific orgy of slaughter and rapine. Priests were attacked with special ferocity, nuns were raped, churches were burned and the Tiber filled up with bodies. As Pope Clement and his cardinals cowered in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the Vatican itself was used a stable for the horses of looting, feral soldiers.

Lutherans gloated at these appalling scenes (the imperial army contained many German soldiers, some of whom were Lutherans), relishing the fact that they were perpetrated by the army of a great Catholic. Clement himself was never forgiven by the people of Rome for the sack – as if it was his fault. When he died, a group of citizens got hold of his corpse, mutilated it and drove a sword through his heart.

But the papacy’s greatest problem was posed not by Henry VIII or by the savage rabble that was Charles V’s army. The real problem was Luther. The first pope who had to deal with him, Leo X, was the wrong pope at the wrong time; he simply could not understand the scope of the challenge that the German presented.

The Catholic Church took a long time to regroup and renew. But, when the organised Catholic fightback, the Counter-Reformation, was under way, it was led by a series of quite splendid popes. Two of them were fierce puritans, men of almost superhuman austerity. The contrast with the worst of the Renaissance popes could hardly have been greater. The leading figure of fightback was, however, not a pope but a minor Spanish nobleman, Saint Ignatius Loyola, a magnificent man who equalled Luther in complexity and was almost his equal in his effect on the world.

The sixteenth century was a period of devastating and momentous change in Europe. Much of this change was intellectual and spiritual; much of it was violent and physical. And much of this was driven by people who were very complex. Some them were so complex as to be incapable of a concise summing-up.

The distinguished American scholar Richard Marius wrote of William Tyndale, perhaps the greatest writer of English that the Reformation produced – and that is high praise – in terms which suggest the essentially enigmatic nature of so many of these sixteenth-century figures. Marius concluded that Tyndale seemed to have been humourless and thoroughly unpleasant, and unable to keep a friend for long. Yet Marius also noted that he was a linguistic genius, as well as brave, constant and intelligent.

In his superb biography of Saint Thomas More, Marius judged that More would never be anything but a stranger to those who study him. He was a divided man. Of course, all human beings are to some extent complex; but, in the sixteenth century, most of the great figures had contradictory and ambiguous personalities. This makes them supremely interesting but most difficult to assess. Some of them, with their modern enthusiastic proponents and zealous detractors, divide to this day. Mary Queen of Scots is an excellent example.

This book is very much about personalities – kings, queens, popes and, above all, prophetic reformers. I strongly believe in the imprint of personality on history, though many modern historians are uneasy with this approach. But I also try, in the course of this book, to deal with the many aspects of the Reformation which transcend personality. However, before we turn to these, it is important to note that men like Luther, Calvin, Knox and Loyola were not other-worldly clerics. They knew real danger; they experienced physical terror.

Luther, fleeing for his life, had to ride fifty miles by night on an unsaddled and ill-tempered horse until he at last reached safety. On another occasion, when he was outlawed and under sentence of death, he was subjected to a false ‘kidnapping’ by his protector the Elector of Saxony, who then imprisoned him, for his own safety, in Wartburg Castle. Calvin had to flee from Paris in disguise; shortly afterwards, he had to leave his native France altogether, fearing for his life. Even in Geneva, the city he came to dominate, he had his enemies. Dogs were set on him; he was shot at. John Knox, as a low-born prisoner of the French, had to endure months of degrading and dangerous toil on the French galleys in the North Sea. Ignatius Loyola, who, unlike the first three, was a genuine soldier, suffered terrible wounds when he was defending the fortified walls of the city of Pamplona against the French. A cannonball smashed into him. For many months, he was in agony, not least because the subsequent surgery was botched – not once but twice.

When we come to issues rather than personalities, the most controversial and difficult is the extent to which the Reformation was a result of venality, slackness and abuse in the old Church. It is easy enough, for example, to describe with relish the depravity of the Renaissance popes. But it is also important to record that reform was already under way within the Roman Church when Luther’s Reformation started, though the process was weak and piecemeal.

It is also important to remember that men like Luther and Calvin were products of the old Church that they rebelled against. The young monk Luther received from the Church a fine education that was to stand him in good stead as he tore into what had nurtured him. Calvin was educated in Paris through the good offices of the old Church; it helped that his father, the clerk to a bishop, had Church connections.

The intellectual ground which was to prove so fertile for the Reformation had been tilled in advance by men who were not by nature fierce reformers. Rather, they were inquiring, sceptical, even satirical. Most of them were humanists – and the greatest of these was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the illegitimate son of a priest and a washerwoman, who himself became a priest – if an unusual one. He had a highly refined mind, but he was too witty, urbane and reasonable to become the booming, bruising force that Luther was. Erasmus and others like him softened up the cerebral climate, as if preparing for Luther’s more crude and potent assault on the orthodoxies of the times.

Luther grew up in a provincial part of a Germany that was disunited (he was to render it even more disunited) but increasingly nationalistic, impatient with the influence of Rome. Many of the German clergy were disliked to the point of detestation. Rightly or wrongly, the Roman Church was regarded as anti-German and as being responsible for economic exploitation and political interference. So, Luther unleashed his revolution in a Germany that was already seething with anti-Roman sentiment. There were clearly far too many clergy, and a significant proportion of them were lazy, ignorant and depraved. One of the things that Luther managed to do was to take religion from these slack priests and hand it to the people themselves.

But, having unleashed the revolt, Luther soon showed his essentially conservative credentials when he identified with the established order during the Peasants’ War. He encouraged a brutal repression of the peasants. This was the time, more than any other, when he could not control his pen. Some of what he wrote was vile. He even told the secular princes that, in putting down the peasants’ revolt, they could gain heaven ‘more easily by bloodshed than by prayer’. This was Luther at his hellish worst, but it also indicated that here was a man with whom the German secular authorities could do business. Many of the German princes were deeply reassured by his response not just to the Peasants’ War but also to the extremely radical Anabaptists.

So, in Germany, it soon became clear that the Reformation was most likely to thrive where the secular power wanted it to. Luther himself wished to make a distinction between legitimate spiritual freedom and what he regarded as mere licence or anarchy. In much of Germany, his Reformation became the device of princes and magistrates.

In a relatively brief spell at the end of the 1530s and in the early 1540s, there was a genuine chance of long-term conciliation if not absolute consensus. It seemed for a time that, if everyone could calm down, the uproar might abate and compromise could be found. Moderates on the Catholic side – numinous men like Cardinals Reginald Pole and Gasparo Contarini – could talk freely and often agree with eminently reasonable Protestant colleagues like Martin Bucer and Philip Melanchthon. These four men continued the spirit of Erasmus in a way that their wilder leaders could not. But this ‘window of compromise’ was soon slammed shut.

When Luther died in 1546, about three-quarters of Germany was Protestant. How was this change marked? Perhaps the most obvious manifestation was that there were far fewer clergy around. And those who were around were probably married. This was a momentous change. Also, people had been encouraged to read the Bible for themselves; before, it had been, in the words of one historian, the Church’s best-kept secret. Now it had been translated by Luther into strong, vernacular German, and the printing presses had made it widely available. Partly because of this, there was a new impetus to literacy. Many monasteries and nunneries had disappeared; some had been confiscated by rapacious princes and minor landowners for their own ends; some had better fates, becoming hospitals or schools.

Norway, Sweden and Denmark were also Protestant. Then John Calvin took the Reformation to its more severe second stage, notably in Geneva, where he established what amounted to a unique theocratic republic. From there, his influence spread rapidly to his native France, to the Netherlands and, above all, to Scotland.

But, by now, the fightback, the Counter-Reformation, was well under way. The shock troops were the Jesuits; the most brutal method of recovery was through the dreaded Inquisition. At the protracted Council of Trent, in northern Italy, the Catholic Church began the tough tasks of redefining its doctrine and organising internal reform. The Reformation had made little impact in Italy and Spain; elsewhere, for example in Poland, there was a successful clawback as Protestantism became ever more fragmented and divisive.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the initial momentum was pretty well spent. Fissile movements, breakaways and extremism were to mark the progress of Protestantism, such as it was, in the seventeenth century. And today, 400 years on, the majority of European Christians are Catholic. Spectacle and hierarchy, both of which most of the early Protestants detested, are once again prevalent. Where Christianity is found, it often appeals to the senses rather than to the intellect. Unfortunately, from my point of view, most Europeans are probably neither Catholic nor Protestant. Western Europe is now the most secularised part of the entire world. If the natural condition of humanity is to be religious, this is not always apparent in today’s Europe.

I have tried to write about all this turbulence, both spiritual and secular, with sensitivity and sympathy. I am a Protestant, but I have tried throughout to be fair and balanced in my treatment of the Catholic Church. The Christian religion is many things. It is obviously in essence spiritual, but it also has its social, political and cultural aspects. In writing this personal survey, my main concern has been to remind people of the colossal significance of the Reformation, for me by far the most important event – or rather, movement – in European history.

And, as a Scot, I am well aware that it played a crucial role in the distinctive development of my own small but very influential nation. Calvin and, in particular, John Knox each had a great impact on the history of Scotland, and I believe it is time that we thought more about them and that we should not be content to dismiss them in negative and glib stereotyping. They both wanted people to apply their religion to all aspects of their everyday living, which in these secular times is not an easy concept to grasp. I also believe that they believed in freedom and equality as well as discipline and control. I think we owe them both a great deal.

This introduction sets out some of the principal themes of this book and is a kind of taster for some of the many episodes and events that will be described and analysed in greater detail later. Central to it all must be the towering figure of Luther, a man who started with no specific religious or political programme but who founded the most far-reaching evangelical revival our world has ever known. Some will no doubt be appalled that God has been mentioned only twice so far and Christ not at all. But they feature in the text that follows, I can assure you.

Luther wanted to return people to God. In his attempt to achieve this, he gave huge numbers of human beings the confidence to believe that their brains were as good as anyone else’s. He wanted people to read and think for themselves, to work things out with the help of the newly available Bible. In the present age, when many people are writing obituaries of the book, we should remember that Luther gave many people the special exhilaration of, for the first time, being able to handle, read and even own books. Whether his Reformation succeeded or not is a huge question, and I shall attempt an answer at the end of this book. What is certain is that Luther lit a great spiritual fire – and it is still burning today, if much less brightly.