Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
by the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. In this way, theologically uneducated radicals could defy learned professors like Luther. One self-taught Anabaptist preacher called scholars “Scripture wizards”, arguing that their hairsplitting subtleties blinded them to the simple truth.26
Luther and the “fanatics” both exemplify Protestantism at work. Both were driven by dazzling religious insights, which they discovered by reading the Bible and which then taught them how to read the Bible. Both denied that any human authority could teach them they were wrong. The Christian liberty that Luther had preached reached far further than he had anticipated. That was his tragedy, and perhaps also his glory.
For while 1525 was a catastrophe, Luther did win a kind of victory. The first revolution was over. But for those princes, city councils, and people who had imbibed the reformers’ preaching, going back to the pre-1517 world was hard to imagine. So Luther found himself representing a safe middle way, the acceptable face of reform. It was an outcome that neither he nor anyone else had expected. His Reformation neither transformed the Church nor was crushed by it. Instead, a de facto partition took shape. One by one, a series of German and Scandinavian cities and territories abolished the Catholic Mass, repudiated the Church’s hierarchy, and required preachers to proclaim Luther’s doctrines. A new form of Christianity was starting to come into being. Luther’s revolution had, like all great revolutions, failed. But like all great revolutions, it had created a new world.
There is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.
– ROMANS 13:1
The Reformation became notorious for two fat men. The first, Martin Luther, we have already met. The second, King Henry VIII of England, was in most things Luther’s opposite. Yet the two men shared a titanic stubbornness, near-messianic self-belief, a knack for dividing Christendom into admirers and enemies, and a lifelong mutual hatred.
Henry VIII was not, except in his own eyes, a great spiritual leader. And yet while the Reformation began as Luther’s story, it quickly became Henry’s. Protestantism started in believers’ souls, as a love affair with God, but it could not be kept tidily in its place. It spilled out into every part of life, and in particular, as we will see throughout this book, it collided with politics, stymied and hijacked by it, but also subverting and occasionally transforming it. Like mating spiders, religious reformers and political leaders needed and exploited each other, but they could never trust each other. To the politicians, Luther’s movement was both a threat to be negotiated and an opportunity to be seized. At the same time, it was either the work of divine providence or a fearful scheme of Satan’s. For politicians are human beings. They felt the tug of Luther’s teachings and of the Church’s warnings on their souls like everybody else.
The intertwined alliance-rivalry between Church and state had been a constant theme of medieval politics. The two sides were like an old married couple, with plenty of accumulated grievances but held together by powerful bonds of affection, loyalty, convenience and habit. Still, even placid marriages can be disrupted when an eye-catching interloper waltzes in.
For the reformers, breaking up this cosy twosome was a necessity. They knew that the pope’s power depended on the cooperation of secular rulers: the kings, princes, and magistrates who actually governed Europe. In this sense, the Reformation was fundamentally a struggle for the backing of secular governments. Without their support, no religious dissidents could last for long. With it, the old Church was at their mercy.
This was a matter of principle as well as of self-preservation. The Church’s hierarchy, Luther insisted, was illegitimate. It dominated and exploited when it should, Christlike, serve and submit. Priests, bishops, and popes should be mere functionaries, chosen by the Christian community to provide them with religious services. But then who should govern the Church? The Anabaptists’ spiritual anarchy was not to Luther’s taste. Long-standing Christian tradition taught that secular rulers, from the Holy Roman Emperor down, had been granted their authority by God. The New Testament taught that Christians should obey such secular rulers as a matter of conscience. What’s more, Europe’s rulers were all baptized Christians, and Luther argued that all baptized Christians were the spiritual equal of any pope. Surely, because God has given princes power over secular matters, it would be natural for them to assume responsibility for religious affairs too.1
In 1520, Luther appealed to Germany’s princes to take religious reform into their own hands. They did not do so – yet. Most preferred to wait and see what would happen, although some encouraged reformist preaching in their territories. Even after the disaster of the Peasants’ War, there was no agreement as to what should actually be done. Worse, a terrifying Turkish invasion, which conquered most of Hungary in 1526 and would reach the walls of Vienna in 1529, meant that this was no time for intra-Christian quarrels. So when the princes of the Holy Roman Empire gathered at the Diet of Speyer in 1526, they unanimously agreed to postpone the problem. Until a proper council of the Church (a much-hoped-for mirage) could resolve the religious questions, each prince should “so live, govern and carry himself” in his religious policy “as he hopes and trusts to answer to God and his Imperial Majesty”.2 Almost by accident, this anodyne resolution created space for something that had never happened before. One by one, territories and cities began to peel away from the universal Church. In the lead was Luther’s own Saxony. Luther published a German order of service for Saxony in 1526, and the new church structure that coalesced there was widely imitated.
The breathing space created at Speyer was brief, but it was enough. In 1529, another Diet of Speyer overwhelmingly passed a resolution rescinding the implicit permissions granted three years earlier, horrified at how they had been used. Overwhelmingly but, this time, not unanimously. Five princes made a formal “Protestation” against the new decree. They, their allies, and their spiritual descendants down to the present became known as Protestants.
Between them, those first Protestants encapsulate the tensions of political Reformation. There is no doubting the real religious conviction behind their stand. Elector Frederick of Saxony, who had protected Luther but never been persuaded by him, had died in 1525. His brother and successor, John, was a true believer. So was George, from 1527 the margrave of Brandenburg, who had been converted by Luther’s courage at the Diet of Worms. Philip, landgrave of Hesse, had also met Luther at Worms, when he was only sixteen. By 1525, when he had commanded the troops who massacred the peasants at Frankenhausen, he was fully in the reformers’ camp. All of these men knew the risk they were taking. Three days after the Protestation, Saxony, Hesse, and three leading Protestant cities – Strassburg, Nuremberg and Ulm – signed a secret defensive pact.3
The risk the princes were taking was matched by the potential rewards. They had already begun to assume full control of the churches in their territories. Even during the Peasants’ War itself, Philip of Hesse was drawing up an inventory of the property owned by monasteries in his lands. After all, Luther’s theology made monasteries redundant and emphasized the rights of secular princes. Surely those hard-pressed and impoverished princes should be able to take over the monasteries’ ill-gotten wealth, to use in God’s service as they saw fit? Once the example was set, it proved too tempting to resist. There was safety in numbers. Each territory that jumped made it easier for the next one. It turned out that the Germans’ modest and conscientious reforms were only a starting point for more rapacious regimes to come.
Outside the Holy Roman Empire, political Reformations first took root in two sets of territories that were in effect safe from outside interference: the ferociously independent cantons of Switzerland, and the lands around the Baltic Sea. We will return to Switzerland’s distinctive, republican Reformations in the next chapter. The Baltic story was, at first, simply an extension of Germany’s. The grand master of the Teutonic Knights, a religious-military