Albert Frederick Pollard

“ The vigorous city life of the Middle Ages was a thing of the past; in many a German town the representative of the territorial sovereign domineered over the elect of the burghers, interfered in their administration, and even controlled their finances. On the shores of the Baltic the destruction of town independence involved the loss of Germany's maritime power, and not till our own day has this eclipse begun to pass. With the decay of civic life went also the ruin of municipal arts and civilisation, and in its stead there was only the mainly formal culture of the petty German Court. ”

“ France had suffered the greatest defeat of the century; Italy lay at his feet; and Ferdinand had added two kingdoms to the family estate. Over every obstacle Charles seemed to have triumphed. But in Germany the universal agitation against Rome had resolved itself into two organised parties which threatened to plunge the nation into civil war. ”

“ By that time Cecil had begun to trim his sails to a different breeze. He was in secret communication with Elizabeth before Mary died, and from the first the new queen relied on Cecil as she relied on no one else. Her confidence was not misplaced; Cecil was exactly the kind of minister England then required. Personal experience had ripened his rare natural gift for avoiding dangers. It was no time for brilliant initiative or adventurous politics; the need was to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, and a via media had to be found in church and state, at home and abroad. Cecil was not a political genius ”

“ In the Edict of Worms Luther had been branded rather as a revolutionary than as a heretic, and the burden of the complaints preferred against him by the Catholic humanists was that his methods of seeking a reformation would be fatal to all order, political or ecclesiastical. They painted him as the apostle of revolution, a second Catiline; and the excesses at Wittenberg might well make them think themselves prophets. ”

“ There is no more disappointing epoch in German history than the reign of Charles V; if in its course it shattered some idols, it also shattered ideals. It began full of hope, and the nation seemed young. There were plans for reforming the Church and renewing the Empire; no one dreamt of dividing the one and destroying the other. Yet such was the result. The Reformation began with ideas and ended in force. In the Germany of the sixteenth, as in that of the nineteenth century, an era of liberal thought closed in a fever of war ”

“ Many and ingenious were the reasons alleged before the world and to his ally of England. In reality there had been a race between the two as to which should make peace first and leave the other in the grip of the enemy. Had Henry won he might have conquered Scotland, and there might have been no Schmalkaldic war. But Charles had proved the nimbler; it was he and not Henry who was left free to deliver his blows in another direction. At the cost of liberal terms to his foe he had duped one of the allies who had helped him to victory; it remains to recount the fate which befell the other. ”

“ Germany was submerged under a flood of constitutional chaos and personal rivalry. Ferdinand was plotting against the Elector of Saxony; many Princes were alienated from Charles by his failure to pay their pensions; and Francis I was seeking to fish in the troubled waters. The experiment of the Reichsregiment had, in fact, been foredoomed to failure from the first; the government contained within itself the seeds of its own disruption because its aims had not been single or disinterested. It was an attempt at national unity dominated by particularist interests. ”

“ Running himself the universal race for wealth, he yet held it to be his special office and duty to hear poor men's complaints, to redress their wrongs, and to relieve their oppression. He strove to stay the economic revolution which was accumulating vast estates in the hands of the few, and turning the many into landless labourers or homeless vagrants; but his only success was an Act of Parliament whereby he gave his tenants legal security against eviction by himself. ”

“ But at length the havoc wrought among his Italian and Spanish troops by a mid-winter siege conquered even his obstinacy. With a grumble at the fickleness of Fortune who preferred a young King to an old Emperor, he raised the siege on January 1, 1553, and turned his back on his German dominions for ever. Success in the war with France would have meant a renewed effort to divide and crush the Lutheran Princes, to rivet the Spanish succession on Germany, and to restore the Catholic faith. Charles' failure left Germany free to settle these questions herself. ”

“ Its pervading principle was that of popular election; each village was to choose a gentleman as its magistrate; two hundred chief places were to select a knight for their bailiff; each ten bailiwicks were to be organised under a city, and each ten cities under a Duke or Prince. One of the Princes was to be elected King, but he, like every subordinate officer, was to be guided by an elected Council. In this scheme town was throughout subordinate to country; half the members of the Councils were to be peasants and half nobles, and agriculture was pronounced the noblest means of sustenance. ”

“ All factions sought to control his person, not because of his personality but because of his position; he was like the Great Seal, only more so, an indispensable adjunct to the wielder of authority. The Protector’s brother tried to bribe him with pocket-money; Northumberland was more subtle and established a complete dominion over his mind, and then put him forward at the age of fourteen as entitled to all the power of Henry VIII. But he was only Northumberland’s mask ”

“ While German national interests were thus subordinated to those of a family, while the nominal control of the Empire's foreign policy was vested in the hands of one who regarded Germany as only a piece in the game of dynastic ambitions, the German people reaped no corresponding advantage from increased security. The endless roll of principalities and powers which adorned Charles Vs style and dazzled the eyes of the Electors proved no more than a paper wall of defence. The Emperor's strength was also his weakness ”

“ The consequences to himself of a demise of the Crown were only too clear; his ambition had led him into so many crimes and had made him so many enemies that his life was secure only so long as he controlled the government and prevented the administration of justice. There was no room for repentance; he could expect no mercy when his foes were once in a position to bring him to book. The accession of Mary would almost inevitably be followed by his own attainder; and the prospect drove him to make one last desperate bid for life and for power. ”

“ To Lübeck itself it is possible that the success of Wullenwever's grandiose ideas of mercantile empire might have been more fatal than their failure. According to Baltic nautical ballads Lübeck long regretted its turbulent Burgomaster, and his name is surrounded in popular legend with something of the halo of a van Artevelde, but his attempt to clothe the new democratic spirit in the worn-out garb of the city-empire was doomed from the first to end in disaster. ”

“ It has been no less a point of honour with Protestant writers, and especially with Germans, to vindicate both the man and the movement from the taint of revolution. The fact that the peasants adopted the Lutheran phrases about brotherly love and Christian liberty proves little, for in a theological age it is difficult to express any movement except in theological terms, and behind these common phrases there lay a radical divergence of aims and methods. The Gospel according to Luther may have contained a message for villeins and serfs, but it did not proclaim the worldly redemption they sought ”

“ War, declared before England had gained the naval experience and wealth of the next fifteen years, and before Spain had been weakened by the struggle in the Netherlands and the depredations of the sea-rovers, would have been a desperate expedient; and the ideas that any action on Elizabeth’s part could have made France Huguenot, or prevented the disruption of the Netherlands, may be dismissed as the idle dreams of Protestant enthusiasts. ”

“ He frankly disbelieved in toleration; “that state,” he said, “could never be in safety where there was a toleration of two religions. For there is no enmity so great as that for religion; and therefore they that differ in the service of their God can never agree in the service of their country.” ”

“ It was no wonder that men declared that Philip of Hesse had done more for the Reformation by his Württemberg enterprise than Luther could do in a thousand books.
Other causes than the weakness of Ferdinand and the disinclination of Lutherans to promote the ends of Francis I moved Catholic and Protestant Princes to the Peace of Cadan. Both alike were threatened by their common foe, the spirit of revolution, which in two different forms had now submerged Catholic Münster and Protestant Lübeck. ”

“ In Germany at all events there can be no pretence that the whole movement was due to the arbitrary caprice of an absolute King. To whatever extent it may have had its roots in the baser passions of mankind, it was at least a popular manifestation. It came from below, and not from above. Charles V was hostile from conviction and from the exigencies of his personal position; the ecclesiastical Princes were hostile from interest if not from conviction; of the temporal Princes only one could be described as friendly, and even Frederick of Saxony was not yet a Lutheran. ”

“ Land, in the eyes of its military feudal lord, was valuable less as a source of money than as a source of men; it was not rent but service that he required, and he was seldom tempted to reduce his service-roll in order to swell his revenues. But the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt, co-operating with more silent and gradual causes, weakened the mutual bonds of interest between landlord and tenant, while the extension of commerce produced a wealthy class which slowly gained admission into governing circles and established itself on the land. ”

“ There was enough truth in it to give point to Murner's satire of Luther as the champion of the Bundschuh, the leader of those who proclaimed that, as Christ had freed them all, and all were children and heirs of one father, all should share alike, all be priests and gentlemen, and pay rents and respect to no man. The outbreak of the Peasants' War appeared to be an invincible corroboration of the charge, and from that day to this it has been almost a commonplace with Catholic historians that the Reformation was the parent of the revolt. ”

“ The appeal to France involved a radical alteration of Hans of Cüstrin's original plan. His object had been merely defence against the threatening aspect assumed by Charles V, but mere defence was of no use to Henry II. French support could only be bought by making the league offensive, and offence was also Maurice's plan. Chagrined at having to yield the first place in the league to Maurice, and alarmed, perhaps, by the terms which Henry II demanded, Hans broke away from the league. A German who was both a patriot and a Protestant could indeed have been offered no more painful choice. ”

“ Henry’s egotism was profound, and personal motives underlay his public action. While political and ecclesiastical conditions made the breach with Rome possible—and in the view of most Englishmen desirable—Henry VIII. was led to adopt the policy by private considerations. He worked for the good of the state because he thought his interests were bound up with those of the nation; and it was the real coincidence of this private and public point of view that made it possible for so selfish a man to achieve so much for his country. ”

“ He may have perceived the impossibility of founding national unity on a discredited imperial system. Unity did not come through any of the methods suggested by the reforming Diets; it only came when the imperial decay, which they tried to check, had run its full course and the Emperor's supremacy had succumbed to the principle of territorial monarchy. To the extension of that principle by methods of blood and iron Germany owes her modern unity as England, France, and Spain owed their unity in the sixteenth century. It was the most potent political principle then fermenting in Europe ”

“ There was no course open to the government that would have satisfied all contemporary or modern critics. England was in the throes of a revolution in which no government could have maintained perfect order or avoided all persecution. The Council's policy lacked the extreme moderation and humanity of Somerset's rule, but it averted open disruption, and did so at the cost of less rigour than characterised the rule of Henry VIII, of Mary, or of Elizabeth. ”

“ That the end of the world was at hand was a common idea of the day. No one was more thoroughly possessed by it than Luther; but while he set little store on the Book of Revelation, the Anabaptists of Münster found in it their chief inspiration. They conceived that they were making straight the path of the Lord by abolishing all human ordinances such as property, marriage, and social distinctions. ”

“ Charles had more than once divided the Lutherans; he had now divided the House of Habsburg.
Maurice alone could restore peace to the Empire. His campaign in Hungary had not been successful, and Zapolya's widow with Solyman's help retained control of Transylvania. But Persia once more diverted the Turk's attention from west to east, and gave Maurice and Ferdinand respite to deal with Albrecht and his notorious lieutenant, Wilhelm von Grumbach. Maurice, who had posed as the liberator of Germany from Spanish tyranny, was now to play the part of saviour of society from princely anarchy. ”

“ With a maxim such as this, it was easy for him to maintain that Elizabeth’s coercive measures were political and not religious. To say that he was Machiavellian is meaningless, for every statesman is so more or less; especially in the 16th century men preferred efficiency to principle. On the other hand, principles are valueless without law and order; and Burghley’s craft and subtlety prepared a security in which principles might find some scope. ”

“ At first sight it may seem strange that an anti-ecclesiastical movement should have been led by ecclesiastics, but the greatest enemies of a class or order generally come from within it; the most successful leaders of democratic revolutions have usually been aristocrats, and the overthrow of Churches has often been the work of Churchmen. So prominent were members of Luther's own Order in the agitation against religious Orders that the whole thing was thought at first to be only a squabble between Augustinians and Dominicans, like many another which had already broken out and been suppressed. ”

“ For another decade Germany was left to fight out its own political and religious quarrels with little help or hindrance from its sovereign. His intervention in 1530-2 had brought peace to no one; the Protestants had little security against the attacks of the Reichskammer-gericht; the Catholics were unable to prevent the progress of heresy; and while Charles was journeying farther and farther away from Germany the Habsburg authority in the Empire was threatened with one of the most serious checks it experienced. ”

“ Had he been as devoid of religious scruples as Maurice of Saxony or Henry of Navarre, and had he had only German feelings to consult, he would in 1548 have become an ostensible Protestant. But Charles would never have bought a kingdom with a Mass; he preferred to lose a kingdom for a Mass, and, in spite of his enmity with the Papacy, he was bent on making Germany Catholic, and on using his victory to decide questions upon which he had declared the struggle would not be fought. ”

“ Scotland, now little more than a province of France, had no desire to see a half-Spanish princess on the English throne, and France was even more reluctant to witness the transference of England's resources to the hands of Charles V. The Emperor was fully occupied with the French war, and Mary had nothing on which to rely except the temper of England. Northumberland's endeavour to alter the Succession might well seem worth the making. He could appeal to the fact that no woman had sat on the English throne, and that the only attempt to place one there had been followed by civil war. ”