Heresy in the Netherlands 103 instances are on record in which he was obliged to give way. The newly acquired provinces were not immediately incorporated in the assembly of States-General. In the Netherlands, as in his other dominions, Charles endeavoured to enforce his will upon the Church. But the rival interests of the great alien sees, possessing ecclesiastical authority over the chief part of his territory, rendered this difficult; and his plan for the creation of six national dioceses failed owing to the opposition of the existing prelates and the Roman See. But in the matter of heresy he succeeded in holding his own for his lifetime. Early in 1521 before the Diet of Worms he issued his first edict in the Netherlands against Luther. By repeated laws, increasing in stringency, he kept if not the Reformed opinions at any rate their public expression within bounds; and the only serious danger of an outbreak in the Netherlands under Charles was at the time of the Anabaptist movement at Münster (1535), when the attempted seizure of Amsterdam by those sectaries led to a more rigorous persecution of them in various parts of the Netherlands. The Inquisition was established on a secular basis, for Charles could not afford to give this powerful instrument into the hands of alien Bishops or the Holy See. But under the surface the forces were growing; the movement was amorphous and heterogeneous; Lutheranism in the North, Zwinglian views in the South, Anabaptist doctrine among the more violent, and towards the end of the reign the more methodical and better organised Calvinistic system were spreading in spite of the Inquisition. The persecution of Charles, which, although vigorous in appearance, was in effect not especially severe, succeeded in concealing rather than in preventing the spread of heresy. This legacy he left to his son. Indeed, though the Netherlands flourished under Charles, though their trade prospered through the connexion with Spain and the Indies, though the wealth of Antwerp and Amsterdam increased year by year, though peace was preserved and apparent obedience, though territory was rounded off and hostile province incorporated, the seeds were being sown which bore fruit in the days of Philip. The pressure of taxation was severe. The Spanish garrisons introduced in the early years of Charles' reign were hated here as elsewhere. Religious causes of discord were constantly growing. Charles spent but a small part of his reign in the Netherlands, but his early years were passed there, and he was never a stranger, nor out of sympathy. His son was a Spaniard, and his home in Spain. The days of Margaret and Maria were to be followed by the rule of a different class of proconsuls, with a different kind of instructions. Then the accumulated discontent, the weariness of longcontinued burdens borne in a cause that was not their own, the strain of the prolonged strife with France, their natural friend, all the errors and mistaken policy of Charles, would make themselves felt; the issue of these things will be seen in a later volume. CHAPTER IV LUTHER THE Reformation of the sixteenth century had its birth and growth in a union of spiritual and secular forces such as the world has seldom seen at any other period of its history. On the secular side, the times were full of new movements, intellectual and moral, political, social, and economic; and spiritual forces were everywhere at work, which aimed at making religion the birthright and possession of the common man whether king, noble, burgher, artisan, or peasant—as well as of the ecclesiastic, a possession which should directly promote a worthy life within the family and the State. These religious impulses had all a peculiar democratic element and were able to impregnate with passion and, for a time, to fuse together the secular forces of the period. Hence their importance historically. If the main defect in the earlier histories of the Reformation has been to neglect the secular sides of the movement, it is possible that more recent historians have been too apt to ignore the religious element which was a real power. It may be an exaggeration to say, as is sometimes done, that this religious side of the Reformation began in the inward religious growth of a single personality - the river comes from a thousand nameless rills and not only from one selected fountain-head; yet Luther was so prominent a figure that the impulses in his religious life may be taken as the type of forces which were at work over a wide area, and the history of these forces may be fitly described in tracing the genesis and growth of his religious opinions from his early years to his struggle against Indulgences. The real roots of the religious life of Luther must be sought for in the family and in the popular religious life of the times. What had Luther and Myconius and hundreds of other boys of the peasant and burgher classes been taught by their parents within the family, and what religious influences met them in the high-school and University? Fortunately the writings of the leaders of new religious movement abound in biographical details; and the recent labours of German historians enable us to form some idea of the discordant elements in the religious life at the close of the fifteenth century. Popular religious life in Germany 105 The religion taught by parents to children in pious German families seems to have been simple, unaffected and evangelical. Myconius relates how his father, a burgher, was accustomed to expound the Apostles' Creed to the boy and to tell him that Jesus Christ was the Saviour from all sins; that the one thing needed to obtain God's pardon for sins was to pray and to trust; and how he insisted above all that the forgiveness of God was a free gift, bestowed without fee by God on man for the sake of what Christ had done. Little books suitable for family instruction were in circulation in which were printed the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and sometimes one or two Psalms in the German tongue. Simple catechisms and other small books of devotion seem to have been in circulation which were full of very simple evangelical teaching. It is probable that Luther repeated a great deal of what was commonly taught to children in his own earliest years, when, in later days, he himself wrote little books for the young. Traces of this simple family piety, which insisted that all holiness came from "trusting in the holy passion of Christ," and that nothing which the sinner could do for himself availed anything, may be found all down the stream of medieval religious life in the most popular hymns and in the sermons of the great revival preachers. The latter half of the fifteenth century saw the growth of a form of piety very different from that simple household religion. A strange terror seemed to brood over the people. The plague came periodically into the crowded and badly drained towns; new diseases made their appearance and added to the prevailing fear; the dread of a Turkish invasion seemed to be prevalent mothers scared their children by naming the Turks, and in hundreds of German parishes the bells tolled. in the village steeples calling the people to pray to God to deliver them from Turkish raids. This prevailing fear bred a strange restlessness. Crowds of pilgrims thronged the highways, trudging from shrine to shrine, hoping to get deliverance from fear and assurance of pardon for sins. Princes who could afford a sufficiently large armed guard visited the holy places in Palestine and brought back relics which they stored in their private chapels; the lesser nobility and the richer burghers made pilgrimages to Rome, especially during the Jubilee years, which became somewhat frequent in the later Middle Ages, and secured indulgences by visiting and praying before the several shrines in the Holy City. the common folk of Germany, in the last decades of the fifteenth century, the favourite place of pilgrimage was Compostella in Spain, and, in the second degree, Einsiedeln in Switzerland. It was said that the bones of St James the Brother of our Lord had been brought from Palestine to Compostella; and the shrine numbered its pilgrims by the hundred thousand a year. So famous and frequent was this place of pilgrimage that a special, one might almost say a professional, class of pilgrims came into existence, the Jacobsbrüder, who were continually on the roads For coming to or from Compostella, seeking to win pardon for themselves or others by their wandering devotion. Sometimes the desire to go on pilgrimage became almost an epidemic. Bands of children thronged the roads, bareheaded and clad in nothing but their shirts; women left their families and men deserted their work. In vain preachers of morals like Geiler von Kaisersberg denounced the practice and said that on pilgrimages more sinners were created than sins pardoned. The terror swayed men and they fled to shrines where they believed they could find forgiveness; the pilgrimage songs make a small literature; and pilgrim guide-books, like the Mirabilia Romae and Die Walfart und Strasse zu Sant Jacob, appeared in many languages. This revival of religion had its special effect on men destined to a religious life. The secular clergy seem to have been the least affected. Chronicles, whether of towns or of families, bear witness to the degradation of morals among the parish priests and the superior clergy. The Benedictines and their dependent Orders of monks do not appear to have shared largely in the religious movement. It was different however with the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the mendicant Augustinians. These begging friars reformed themselves strenuously, in the medieval sense of reformation. They went back to their old lives of mortifying the flesh, of devoting themselves to works of practical benevolence and of self-denying activity. As a consequence, they, and not the parish clergy, had become the trusted religious leaders of the people.. Their chapels were thronged by the common folk, and the better disposed nobles and burghers took them for their confessors and spiritual directors. It was in vain that the Roman Curia proclaimed, by its Legates in Germany, the old doctrine that the benefits of religious acts do not depend upon the personal character of the administrators; that it published regulations binding all parishioners to confess at least once a year to their parish priests. The people, high and low, felt that Bishops who rode to the Diet accompanied by their concubines disguised in men's clothing, and parish priests who were tavern-keepers or the most frequent customers at the village public-house, were not true spiritual guides. They turned for the consolations of religion to the poor-living, hard-working Franciscans and Augustinian Eremites who listened to their confessions and spoke comfortingly to their souls, who taught the children and said masses without taking fees. The last decades of the fifteenth century were the time of a revival in the spiritual power and devotion of the mendicant Orders. One result of the underlying fear which inspired this religious revival was the way in which the personality of Christ was constantly regarded in the common Christian thought of the time as it is revealed to us in autobiographies, in sermons, and in pictorial representations. The Saviour was concealed behind the Judge, who was to come to punish the wicked. Luther tells us that when he was a boy in the Cults of the Virgin and St Anne 107 parish church his childish imagination was inflamed by the stained-glass picture of Jesus, not the Saviour, but the Judge, of a fierce countenance, seated on a rainbow, and carrying a flaming sword in His hand. This idea prevented pious people who held it from approaching Jesus as an intercessor. He Himself needed to be interceded with on behalf of the poor sinners He was coming to judge. And this thought in turn gave to the adoration of the Virgin Mother a strength and intensity hitherto unknown in medieval religion. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception had strenuous advocates; men and women formed themselves into confraternities that they might beseech her intercession with the strength that numbers give; and these confraternities spread all over Germany. The intercessory powers of the Virgin Mother became a more and more important element in the popular religion, and little books of devotion were in circulation - the Little Gospel, the Pearl of the Passion - which related with many a comment the words of Christ on the Cross to St John and to the Virgin. Then the idea grew up that the Virgin herself had to be interceded with in order to become an intercessor; and her mother, St Anne, became the object of a cult which may almost be called new. This "Cult of the Blessed Anna" rapidly extended itself in ever-widening circles until there were few districts in Germany which had not their confraternities devoted to her service. Such was the prevailing enthusiastic popular religion of the last decades. of the fifteenth century-the religion which met and surrounded a sensitive boy when he left his quiet home and entered the world. It had small connexion, save in the one point of the increased reverence paid to the Virgin, with the theology of the Schools, but it was the religious force among the people. Side by side with this flamboyant popular religion can be discerned another spiritual movement so unlike it, so utterly divergent from it in character and in aim, that it is surprising to detect its presence within the same areas and at the same period, and that we need scarcely wonder that it has been so largely overlooked. Its great characteristic was that laymen began to take into their own hands matters which had hitherto been supposed to be the exclusive property of churchmen. We can discern the impulse setting in motion at the same time princes, burghers, and artisans, each class in its own way. The Great Council of Constance had pledged the Church to a large number of practical reforms, aiming at the reinvigoration of the various local ecclesiastical institutions. These pledges had never been fulfilled, and their non-fulfilment accounts for one side of the German opposition to Rome. During the last decades of the fifteenth century some of the German Princes assumed the right to see that within their lands proper discipline was exercised over the clergy as well as over the laity. To give instances would need more space than this chapter affords. It is enough to say that the jus episcopale which Luther claimed in later |