1528-9]

Diet of Speier

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Aragon. The Emperor also wanted Catholic help to restore his brotherin-law, Christian II of Denmark, deposed by his Lutheran subjects; he desired papal recognition for Ferdinand's new kingdoms; and his own imperial authority in Germany could not have survived the secularisation of the ecclesiastical electorates. Empire and Papacy, said Zwingli, both emanated from Rome; neither could stand if the other fell. At the same time the issue of the war in Italy in 1528-9 convinced Clement that he could not stand without Charles, and paved the way for the mutual understanding which was sealed by the Treaty of Barcelona (June 29, 1529). It was almost a family compact; the Pope's nephew was to marry the Emperor's illegitimate daughter, the Medici tyranny was to be re-established in Florence, the divorce of Catharine to be refused, the papal countenance to be withdrawn from Zapolya, and Emperor and Pope were to unite against Turks and heretics. The Treaty of Cambray (August 3) soon afterwards released Charles from his war with France and left him free for a while to turn his attention to Germany.

The growing intimacy between the Emperor and Pope had already smoothed the path of reaction, and reinforced the antagonism of the Catholic majority to the Lutheran princes. In 1528 Charles sent the Provost of Waldkirch to Germany to strengthen the Catholic cause; Duke Henry of Mecklenburg returned to the Catholic fold; the wavering Elector Palatine forbade his subjects to attend the preaching of Lutherans; and at the Diet of Speier, which met on February 21, 1529, the Evangelicals found themselves a divided and hopeless minority opposed to a determined and solid majority of Catholics. Only three of their number were chosen to sit on the committee appointed to discuss the religious question. Charles had sent instructions denouncing the Recess of 1526 and practically dictating the terms of a new one. The Catholics were not prepared to admit this reduction of the Diet to the status of a machine for registering imperial rescripts; but their modifications were intended rather to show their independence than to alter the purport of Charles' proposals, and their resolutions amounted to this: there was to be complete toleration for Catholics in Lutheran States, but no toleration for Lutherans in Catholic States, and no toleration anywhere for Zwinglians and Anabaptists; the Lutherans were to make no further innovations in their own dominions, and clerical jurisdictions and property were to be inviolate.

The differentiation between Lutherans and Zwinglians was a skilful attempt to drive a wedge between the two sections of the anti-Catholic party,—an attempt which Melanchthon's pusillanimity nearly brought to a successful issue. The Zwinglian party included the principal towns of South Germany; but Melanchthon was ready to abandon them as the price of peace for the Lutheran Church. Philip of Hesse, however, had none of the theological narrowness which characterised Luther and

204

Protest against the decisions of the Diet

[1529

Melanchthon, and, in a less degree, even Zwingli; he was not so blind as the divines to the political necessities of the situation, and he managed to avert a breach for the time; it was due to him that Strassburg and Ulm, Nürnberg and Memmingen, and other towns added their weight to the protest against the decree of the Diet. Jacob Sturm of Strassburg and Tetzel of Nürnberg were, indeed, the most zealous champions of the Recess of 1526 during the debates of the Diet; but their arguments and the mediation of moderate Catholics remained without effect upon the majority. The complaint of the Lutherans that the proposed Recess would tie their hands and open the door to Catholic reaction naturally made no impression, for such was precisely its object. The Catholics saw that their opportunity had come, and they were determined to take at its flood the tide of reaction. The plea that the unanimous decision of 1526 could not be repealed by one party, though plausible enough as logic and in harmony with the particularism of the time, rested upon the unconstitutional assumption that the parties were independent of the Empire's authority; and it was not reasonable to expect any Diet to countenance so suicidal a theory.

A revolution is necessarily weak in its legal aspect, and must depend on its moral strength; and to revolution the Lutheran Princes in spite of themselves were now brought. They were driven back on to ground on which any revolution may be based; and a secret understanding to withstand every attack made on them on account of God's Word, whether it proceeded from the Swabian League or the national government, was adopted by Electoral Saxony, Hesse, Strassburg, Ulm, and Nürnberg. We fear the Emperor's ban, wrote one of his party, but we fear still more God's curse; and God, they proclaimed, must be obeyed before man. This was an appeal to God and to conscience which transcended legal considerations. It was the very essence of the Reformation, though it was often denied by Reformers themselves; and it explains the fact that from the Protest, in which the Lutherans embodied this principle, is derived the name which, for want of a better term, is loosely applied to all the Churches which renounced the obedience of Rome.

A formal Protest against the impending Recess of the Diet had been discussed at Nürnberg in March, and adopted at Speier in April. When, on the 19th, Ferdinand and the other imperial commissioners refused all concessions and confirmed the Acts of the Diet, the Protest was publicly read. The Protestants affirmed that the Diet's decree was not binding on them because they were not consenting parties; they proclaimed their intention to abide by the Recess of 1526, and so to fulfil their religious duties as they could answer for it to God and the Emperor. They demanded that their Protest should be incorporated in the Recess, and on Ferdinand's refusal, they published a few days later an appeal from the Diet to the Emperor, to the next General Council of Christendom, or to a congress of the German nation. The Princes who signed

1529

The original Protestants

205

the Protest were the Elector John of Saxony, Margrave George of Brandenburg, Dukes Ernest and Francis of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Landgrave Philip of Hesse, and Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt; and the fourteen cities which adhered to it were Strassburg, Ulm, Nürnberg, Constance, Lindau, Memmingen, Kempten, Nördlingen, Heilbronn, Reutlingen, Isny, St Gallen, Wissenberg, and Windsheim. Of such slender dimensions was the original Protestant Church; small as it was, it was only held together by the negative character of its Protest; dissensions between its two sections increased the conflict of creeds and parties which rent the whole of Germany for the following twentyfive years.

CHAPTER VII

THE CONFLICT OF CREEDS AND PARTIES IN

GERMANY

THE threats of the victorious Catholic majority at Speier and the diplomacy of Philip of Hesse had, despite the forebodings of Luther and the imprecations of Melanchthon, produced a temporary alliance between the Lutheran north and the Zwinglian south; and the summer and autumn of 1529 were spent in attempts to make the union permanent and to cement it by means of religious agreement. In the secret understanding concluded between Electoral Saxony, Hesse, Nürnberg, Ulm, and Strassburg at Speier on April 22, it was arranged that a conference should be held at Rodach, near Coburg, in the following June. But this coalition between Lutheran Princes and Zwinglian towns had been concealed from the divines, and as soon as it came to their ears they raised a vehement protest. Melanchthon lamented that his friends had not made even greater concessions at Speier; if they had only repudiated Zwingli and all his works, the Catholics, he thought, might not have hardened their hearts against Luther; and he did his best to dissuade his friends in Nürnberg from participating in the coming congress at Rodach. Luther not only denounced the idea of defending by force what Melanchthon described as "the godless opinions " of Zwingli, but denied the right of Lutherans to defend themselves. Resort to arms he considered both wicked and needless; "Be ye still," he quoted from Isaiah, "and ye shall be holpen "; and, while the conference at Rodach succumbed to his opposition, a vast army of Turks was swarming up the banks of the Danube and directing its march on Vienna. Solyman brandished the sword which Luther refused to grasp.

Hungary had failed to resist the Turks by herself; but the Austrian shield, under which she took shelter, afforded no better protection, and Ferdinand only escaped the fate of Louis II because he kept out of the way. Absorbed in the Lutheran conflict, he made no attempt to secure his conquests of 1527, and, when the Turkish invasion began, Zapolya descended from his stronghold in the Carpathians, defeated a handful of Ferdinand's friends, and surrendered the crown of St Stephen on the

1529]

Siege of Vienna.- Conference of Marburg

207

scene of Mohács to the Sultan. Unresisted, the Turkish forces swept over the plains of Hungary, crossed the imperial frontier, and on September 20 planted their standards before the walls of Vienna. But over these the Crescent was never destined to wave, and the brilliant defence of Vienna in 1529 stopped the first, as a still more famous defence a hundred and fifty years later foiled the last, Turkish onslaught on Germany. The valour of the citizens, the excellence of the artillery, with which the late Emperor Maximilian had furnished the city, and the early rigour of winter supplied the defects of the Habsburg power, and on October 15 Solyman raised the siege. Ferdinand failed to make adequate use of the Sultan's retreat; lack of pay caused a mutiny of landsknechte; and though Gran fell into his hands he could not recapture Buda, and the greater part of Hungary remained under the nominal rule of Zapolya, but real control of the Turk.

In

The relief of Vienna was received with mingled feelings in Germany. Luther, who had once denied the duty of Christians to fight the infidel as involving resistance to God's ordinance, had been induced to recant by the imminence of danger and the pressure of popular feeling. 1529 he exhorted his countrymen to withstand the Turk, in language as vigorous as that in which he had urged them to crush the peasants; and the retreat of the Ottoman was generally hailed as a national deliverance. But the joy was not universal, even in Germany. Secular and religious foes of the Habsburgs had offered their aid to Zapolya; while Philip of Hesse lamented the Turkish failure and hoped for another attack. The Turk was in fact the ally of the Reformation, which might have been crushed without his assistance; and to a clear-sighted statesman like Philip no other issue than ruin seemed possible from the mutual enmity of the two Protestant Churches.

The abortive result of the meeting at Rodach in June and the abandonment of the adjourned congress at Schwabach in August only stirred the Landgrave to fresh efforts in the cause of Protestant union. On the last day in September he assembled the leading divines of the two communions at his castle of Marburg with a view to smoothing over the religious dissensions which had proved fatal to their political co-operation. The conference was not likely to fail for want of eminent disputants. The two heresiarchs themselves, Luther and Zwingli, were present, and their two chief supporters, Melanchthon and Oecolampadius. The Zwinglian cities of Germany were represented by Bucer and Hedio of Strassburg; the Lutherans by Justus Jonas and Caspar Cruciger from Wittenberg, Myconius from Gotha, Brenz from Hall, Osiander from Nürnberg, and Stephen Agricola from Augsburg. But they came in different frames of mind; Luther prophesied failure from the first, and it was with the greatest difficulty that Melanchthon could be induced even to discuss accommodation with such impious doctrines as Zwingli's. On the other hand the Zurich Reformer started with