The Reformation (continued); the Catholic Reaction.

In Switzerland the new doctrines were preached as early as 1516 by Ulrich Zwingli, born in 1484, in the canton of St. Gall. He was a man of enthusiasm for and learning in the Greek language, a gifted preacher, a zealous patriot, and a very able politician. In 1518 he was chosen as preacher in the minster at Zurich, where the Reformation was formally adopted in 1523. The progress of the new opinions split the cantons into two hostile sections, and in 1528 five Roman Catholic cantons formed an alliance to which the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, afterwards emperor, was admitted. In the war which ensued, in 1531, the Catholics made a sudden attack on the men of Zurich, and Zwingli was left dead on the field. ^ His position as a reformer was in advance of Luther's. He repudiated everything, not only in doctrine, but in the formal worship and constitution of the Church, which was not expressly enjoined in Scripture. He was so liberal, in those days, as to maintain the salvation of unbaptised infants and of such virtuous heathens as Socrates, Plato, Seneca, and others. The movement at Geneva is for ever associated with the name of the acute, logical, hard-headed, arbitrary, and somewhat hard-hearted Jean Calvin, born at Noyon in Picardy in 1509. In the history of the great religious revolution his name is only less illustrious than that of Luther. Calvin rendered to Protestantism the two great services of drawing up a system of doctrine in his famous Institutio, a masterpiece of lucid argument based on the Scriptures, and of organising its ecclesiastical discipline. He was thus at once the great theologian of the reformers and the founder of a new Church polity; and his commentaries on the Bible have given him a foremost place as an expositor. In the political view, Calvinism is closely associated with the cause of civil freedom. The great French reformer had to flee for his life from Paris in 1533, and to Switzerland three years later, arriving at Geneva in the autumn of 1536. The citizens had recently emancipated themselves from the Catholic duke of Savoy, and a Protestant Confession of Faith was now proclaimed. Calvin, after being expelled from the city by a party who disliked the strict new moral regime established by the reformers, was recalled in 1541, and became a sort of autocrat in civil and religious affairs. A stain rests on his memory from the treatment accorded by the champions of freedom, as against the Roman See, to Servetus, a Spanish theologian who had put forth views which Calvin and his followers abhorred. He declared, in a private letter, that if Servetus ever came to Geneva, he should not be suffered to leave the place alive. The man was arrested on his way to Italy in 1553, and, after a trial lasting for two months, with intervals, he was burnt to death. Calvin vainly tried to have the mode of death alleviated, and that was the extent of his mercy towards one who dared to hold what he, in his view of the Scriptures, considered to be wrongful doctrine concerning the Trinity. The bigotry of some of the reformers has been already alluded to, and it is shameful to have to admit that such a man as Melanchthon saw nothing but cause for gratitude in the atrocity perpetrated at Geneva. The influence of Calvin was great in France during the religious wars, and his form of Christianity is still that which prevails in the Presbyterian Churches of the British Isles and the United States, and in many other bodies dissenting from the episcopal system.

In England, the divorce of Henry VIII. from Katharine in 1533 was not the cause, but the mere occasion, of the rupture with Rome. As in Germany, the Reformation was due to forces long at work. In teaching and in practice alike, the Church was in need of drastic change, and men who never broke away from the Papal See, such as More and Colet, were far in advance of mediaeval traditions. The Pope had been regarded for centuries as a foreign prince whose claims were hostile to English interests, and, in the matter of the divorce, there were many besides Henry who believed Clement VII., as an Italian prince ruling the States of the Church, to be guided in his opposition rather by fear of Charles V., who was Katharine's nephew, than by any higher considerations. A series of statutes between 1532 and 1535 made an end of Papal authority in England, the Act of Supremacy, in 1534, declaring the sovereign to be the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, and bringing to the scaffold, as traitors who denied this view, the admirable More and the excellent Bishop Fisher of Rochester. The suppression of the monasteries, and the seizure of their landed and other possessions, which began in 1:536, and was carried out under the direction of Henry's able and unscrupulous Protestant statesman Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex, caused the serious rebellion of 1536, in the north of England, called the Pilgrimage of Grace, headed by a lawyer named Robert Aske. Many thousands of insurgents were in arms, and York, Hull, and Pontefract Castle were taken. The matter ended in the dispersal of the rebels on specious promises from the king's general, the duke of Norfolk, and the execution of Aske and some abbots. The northern folk were, in the main, strongly attached to the old faith, and the poor specially resented the destruction of the institutions which had been the chief almsgivers. At this time there were three chief religious parties. There were those who, like More and Fisher, still regarded the Pope as head of the Church. The kings party, rejecting Papal authority, adhered to the old faith. The reforming party, utterly opposed to the Pope, rejected much of the doctrine and ritual of Rome. Henry, as is well known, lived and died a Catholic in all points save that of Papal supremacy. In 1520 he had taken the field against Luther with his pen, and his work On the Seven Sacraments won from Leo the title of Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith), still marked by the letters F.D. on our coins. In 1536, under the influence of Thomas Cromwell, he made some concession to the reforming party by allowing a complete English Bible, the translation of Tyndale and Coverdale, to be placed in the churches, but three years later the Act of Six Articles, called by the Protestants the " Whip with Six Strings," upheld some of the chief Catholic doctrines under severe penalties for denial.

It was under Edward VI. (1547-1553) that the faith of the Anglican Church was changed. The Statute of Six Articles was repealed, and the Liturgy was purged by Cranmer of what was conceived to be Popish error, in his compilation of the First and Second Books of Common Prayer. In 1551 the 42 Articles of Religion rejected all the Sacraments except Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and denied the "real presence" or transubstantiation, with the rejection of a belief in purgatory and the practices of invocation of saints, prayers for the dead, and clerical celibacy. Insurrections in Norfolk and Devonshire were due partly to the religious changes and partly to the suffering caused by the inclosure of lands. Cranmer's lawless attempt to bring in a Protestant successor in the person of Lady Jane Grey utterly failed, and a reaction came under Mary Tudor (Mary I.) in 1553, the bigoted daughter of Henry and Katharine. Gardiner, bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor, a strong Catholic, and Bonner, bishop of London, conducted the persecution which lasted from 1555 until Mary's death in 1558. This direful work, in which about 300 people of all ranks, including some women and children, perished by fire, was of vast service to the Protestant cause. Setting aside Cranmer, who was only a "martyr" after he had renounced his Protestantism, and who only recanted back again when he found that, in any case, he was doomed to die, it seems certain that the deaths of Bishops Hooper, Ridley, and Latimer, and their fellow-victims, aroused an indignation which made many conform to the new system.

The final settlement came under Elizabeth (1558-1603), the great queen who, though she was, by inheritance, a Tudor tyrant, was very prudent and patriotic withal, yielding to her people's wishes when they were strongly expressed in Parliament, preserving peace almost throughout her reign, save when war was forced on her by Spain, and thus enabling the nation to recover from the troubles of the past, and to develop manufacturing industry and commerce. It is probable that she was only a political Protestant. The Anglican Church, a compromise between Rome and Geneva, was established with the sovereign as its visible head, and into this groove Elizabeth strove to force all her subjects by an Act of Uniformity and by a Court of High Commission for the suppression of heresy and schism. Catholics on the one hand, and the Protestant dissenters from the Church on the other, the people known as Puritans because they claimed to be purer in faith and ritual than those who had accepted the Church-pattern, were alike persecuted, and in 1563 the 39 Articles, mainly the same as the 42 of Edward VI., stated the views of the Anglican Church. Protestantism may be held to have received its final sanction in England in the appearance, under James I., of the new and noble translation of the Bible called the Authorised Version (1611), after a vain attempt to reconcile the Puritan and Episcopalian parties at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604. We may note that when Elizabeth came to the throne, half her subjects, as good authorities hold, were still Roman Catholics in belief. If this were so, the larger part of that half simply drifted into Protestantism under influences of various kinds in the course of the reign. The Puritans, we may observe, chiefly inspired from Geneva and by Calvin, were obnoxious to Elizabeth partly because she saw in them the supporters of a larger political freedom than that which she was disposed to accord. She managed the conflicting parties with great skill, and at her death the severance from Rome was almost universally accepted. The Protestant revolution in England, only confirmed by the Papal hostility shown in bulls of excommunication and deposition, and by the issue of the conflict with the hated Philip of Spain, was of great importance to the cause of the Reformation in other countries. In Scotland, the death of James IV. at Flodden, in 1513, left an infant king as successor, and an anarchical condition of affairs ensued in the earlier years of James V. (1513-1542), under the regencies of the duke of Albany and the earl of Angus, amid the incessant feuds of the two great' factions of nobles, the Hamiltons and the Douglases. Angus, himself a Douglas, as " guardian " of the king, treated him as a prisoner and a mere tool of his ambition until the king, in 1528, at 15 years of age, made his escape and assumed regal power. Angus fled to England, with the forfeiture of his estates, and the king chose his chief ministers from among great ecclesiastics. The nobles, in their jealousy, then began to lean towards the reformed doctrines, aiding the elements of religious change which in Scotland, as elsewhere, had long been working. The clergy were disliked and despised by the people, and in 1525 an Act was passed forbidding the importation of Lutheran books, and the spread of his "damnable" opinions. The spirit of bigotry and persecution soon led the Scottish Church-authorities further, and in 1528 Patrick Hamilton, an abbot who had received his Protestant teaching from Luther's lips, died by burning at St. Andrews. The lower orders of the clergy, including some of the preaching friars, favoured the new doctrines. James V., a man of vigorous rule who sternly checked the turbulence of chiefs on the Borders and in the western Highlands, supported the persecution of "heretics." The old alliance with France was renewed in 1537 by the king's marriage with a daughter of Francis I., and, on her early death, with Mary of Lorraine, better known as Mary of Guise, daughter of the powerful French duke of Guise. The power of the Crown in Scotland was increased at this time by an Act revoking all grants made to nobles during the king's minority, and another statute annexed the Hebrides, and the Orkney and Shetland Isles, and seized many lordships for the sovereign. His death came in December, 1542, after the shameful rout of a Scottish army by a small English cavalry-force at Solway Moss, in the north of Cumberland. His spirit was broken by the disaster due to the misconduct, through hostility to their king, of Scottish nobles, and another long minority began when the crown was left to his daughter Mary Stuart, born in the palace of Linlithgow only seven days before her father expired. The regent was James Hamilton, earl of Arran, who was soon at war with Henry VIII., when the strong national feeling forced him to decline a contract of marriage between the little queen and Prince Edward of England. In 1544 and 1545 English forces invaded the country by land and sea, partly destroying Edinburgh and Leith, and ravaging the south-east Lowlands with the utmost ferocity. The ripe crops were burned, with many towns, villages, and abbeys, these last including those of Melrose, Roxburgh, Dryburgh, and Kelso. In 1547, when Edward VI. was the boy-king of England, the Protector Somerset severely defeated the Scots, under Arran, at the battle of Pinkie, near Musselburgh. The little queen Mary was then sent away for safety to France, betrothed to the king's eldest son, afterwards Francis II., and brought up, at a very vicious court, as a strict Catholic, facts which should be remembered in her favour when an estimate is made either of her character or of the difficulties of her position, at a later time, as a ruler of a "heretical" nation. In 1554 Mary of Guise, Mary Stuart's mother, became regent, and her system of rule gave much offence to the body of the nation in assigning posts of honour and profit to her countrymen, and using French soldiers to garrison the fortresses.

Turning again to the religious revolution that was pending, we find the influence of Calvin and Geneva strongly at work in the northern kingdom. Cardinal Beaton (or Bethune), archbishop of St. Andrews, was a stern opponent of the reformers. This able man, partly educated at Paris University, and formerly "resident" for Scotland at the French court, and special ambassador to France for James V., had obtained from the Pope (Paul III.) the appointment of legate in Scotland, with supreme authority in all ecclesiastical affairs, and he soon caused the establishment of a "Court of Inquisition" to deal with heresy. In 1546, after hanging, drowning, or banishing various offenders, Beaton and other prelates, looking out from a window of the castle of St. Andrews, witnessed the burning of George Wishart, a man who had been accused of heresy in 1538 for teaching the Greek New Testament, as a schoolmaster in Montrose, and had then retired to the Continent, where he associated with reformers in Germany and Switzerland. In 1543 he was a professor at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he had as one of his students a youth named Tylney, who describes him as a tall, black-haired, long-bearded, comely personage, of melancholy cast of features, courteous, lowly, glad to teach, desirous to learn. He then went back to Scotland, and became an enthusiastic and eloquent preacher of the doctrine of justification by faith as opposed to the Catholic insistence on the efficacy of good works. Beaton's treatment of Wishart soon brought his own death. The Cardinal was not only haughty, cruel, and intolerant, but of very licentious character. When Wishart was burned, there were many who said that they would not suffer innocent men to be slain A plot against him was formed, and in May, 1546, a few weeks after Wishart's martyrdom, a party of men murdered him at his castle of St. Andrews. The ablest champion of the Roman religious system in Scotland was dead. The 16 conspirators who slew Beaton, joined by above 100 men, held out against the regent, in the castle of St. Andrews, for more than 12 months, when they were forced to surrender by the arrival and attack of some French war-galleys, on board which they were conveyed to France, where the leaders were imprisoned or sent to slavery at the galleyoars. The religious struggle in Scotland went on, and in 1550 Adam Wallace, a humble layman from Ayrshire, was burned for heresy.