A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World
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A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World
Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition A series of handbooks and reference works on the intellectual and religious life of Europe, 500–1800
Editor-in-Chief
Christopher M. Bellitto (Kean University)
VOLUME 28
A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World Edited by
Thomas Max Safley
LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011
On the cover: Gerard ter Borch’s monumental oil painting “The Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 1648”, National Gallery, London (Art Media / Heritage-Images / Imagestate) This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A companion to multiconfessionalism in the early modern world / edited by Thomas Max Safley. p. cm. — (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition, ISSN 1871-6377 ; v. 28) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20697-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Church history—Modern period, 1500– 2. Religious pluralism—Christianity—History. 3. Religious pluralism— Europe—History. 4. Church and state—Europe—History. 5. Europe—Church history. I. Safley, Thomas Max. BR290.C66 2011 274’.06—dc22 2011011505
ISSN 1871-6377 ISBN 978 90 04 20697 7 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.
CONTENTS Notes on Contributors ......................................................................
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Multiconfessionalism: A Brief Introduction ................................. Thomas Max Safley
1
PART ONE
CONFESSIONS Confessions ......................................................................................... Lee Palmer Wandel
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PART TWO
THE NETHERLANDS Confessional Coexistence in the Early Modern Low Countries .............................................................................. Jesse Spohnholz
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Multiconfessionalism in a Commercial Metropolis: The Case of 16th-Century Antwerp ............................................................ Guido Marnef
75
“In Equality and Enjoying the Same Favor”: Biconfessionalism in the Low Countries .................................................................... Benjamin J. Kaplan
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PART THREE
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE A Multiconfessional Empire ............................................................ David M. Luebke
129
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Protestant Imperial Knights, Multiconfessionalism, and the Counter-Reformation ............................................................ Richard J. Ninness
155
Multiconfessionalism in the Holy Roman Empire: The Case of Colmar, 1550–1750 .................................................................. Peter G. Wallace
179
PART FOUR
FRANCE France: An Overview ........................................................................ Keith P. Luria
209
Peace Commissioners at the Beginning of the Wars of Religion: Toward an Interactionist Interpretation of the Pacification Process in France ........................................................................... 239 Jérémie Foa One Town, Two Faiths: Unity and Exclusion during the French Religious Wars ................................................................. Penny Roberts
265
PART FIVE
BRITAIN Multiconfessionalism in Early Modern Britain ............................ Bernard Capp
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Early Modern Ireland as Multiconfessional State ........................ Raymond Gillespie
317
European Multiconfessionalism and the English Toleration Controversy, 1640–1660 ............................................................... John Coffey
341
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PART SIX
CENTRAL EUROPE Multiconfessionalism in Central Europe ....................................... Howard Louthan
369
Multiconfessionalism in Transylvania ........................................... Graeme Murdock
393
Five Confessions in One City: Multiconfessionalism in Early Modern Wilno ..................................................................... David Frick
417
Works Cited ........................................................................................
445
Index ....................................................................................................
477
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Bernard Capp is a Fellow of the British Academy, and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick, where he has taught since 1968. He has published five monographs on early modern English history, and is currently completing a book on “England’s Culture Wars, 1649–60”. John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester. He works on religion, politics, and ideas and is the author of three books including Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England (New York: 2000). Most recently, he has co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, UK: 2008) and Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Notre Dame, IN: 2009). Jérémie Foa teaches history at the University Lyon 2. He specialises in the history of the Wars of Religion and in peace implementation on this period. His recent publications include “An Unequal Apportionment. The Conflict over Space between Protestants and Catholics at the Beginning of the Wars of Religion,” French History 20 (2006): 369–386 and Le Bruit des armes. Mises en formes et désinformations au temps des guerres de Religion (Paris: 2011), edited with Paul-Alexis Mellet. David Frick is Professor and former Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on questions of philology and rhetoric, as well as religion, culture, and society in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the early modern period, especially the seventeenth century. Among his publications are Polish Sacred Philology in the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation: Chapters in the History of the Controversies, 1551–1632 (Berkeley: 1989), Rus’ Restored: Selected Writings of Meletij Smotryc’kyj, 1610–1630 (Cambridge, MA: 2005), and Wilnianie: Żywoty siedemnastowieczne (Warsaw: 2008). Raymond Gillespie teaches history at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and has written extensively on the social and cultural history of early modern Ireland, including Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: 1997).
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Benjamin J. Kaplan holds the Chair in Dutch History at University College London. In addition to the Low Countries, he specializes in the Reformation and the history of religious conflict and toleration. His recent publications include Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2007). Howard Louthan is Professor of History at the University of Florida. His previous publications include The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna (Cambridge, UK: 1997) and Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, UK: 2009). David M. Luebke is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon. His publications include His Majesty’s Rebels: Communities, Factions, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest, 1725–1745 (Ithaca, NY: 1997), The Counter-Reformation: Essential Readings (Oxford: 1999), and articles on the religious and political cultures of ordinary people in the German-speaking lands. He is currently at work on a monograph, “Hometown Religion: Conflict and Coexistence among the Christian Religions of Germany, 1553–1650”. Keith P. Luria is Professor of History at North Carolina State University and the author of Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France (Washington, DC: 2005). He is working on the history of early-modern relations between Europe and the non-European world through religious missions. Guido Marnef is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Antwerp. He specializes in the political, religious, and cultural history of the 16th- and 17th-century Low Countries. His many publications include Antwerp in the Age of Reformation (Baltimore: 1996). Graeme Murdock is Lecturer in European History at Trinity College Dublin. His research interests include the history of religion in early modern Hungary and France, and his publications include Calvinism on the Frontier. International Calvinism and the Reformed Church of Hungary and Transylvania, c. 1600–1660 (Oxford: 2000); Confessional Identity in East-Central Europe (Aldershot: 2002) and Beyond Calvin. The Intellectual, Political and Cultural World of Europe’s Reformed Churches, c. 1540–1620 (New York: 2004).
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Richard J. Ninness is an Assistant Professor at Touro College. His book, Between Opposition and Collaboration: Nobles, Bishops, and the German Reformations in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg (1555–1619), is forthcoming in 2011 with Brill Academic Publishers. Penny Roberts is Associate Professor (Reader) in History at the University of Warwick. She has written extensively on the social, political, religious, and cultural history of the French religious wars. Her forthcoming publications include a book on peacemaking during the wars and an edited volume on violence in 16th-century France. Thomas Max Safley is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in the economic and social history of early modern Europe, his most recent publications include Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg (Leiden: 2005) and Kinder, Karitas und Kapital (Augsburg: 2009/2020). Jesse Spohnholz is Assistant Professor of History at Washington State University. His research focuses on the practices of religious toleration during the age of religious wars as well as religion, family, and gender in the Netherlands and northwest Germany. He is the author of The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in Age of Religious War (Newark, DE: 2010). Peter G. Wallace is Professor of History at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and specializes in early modern European history. Published works include Communities and Conflict in Early Modern Colmar, 1575–1730 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: 1995), and The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity, 1350–1750 (New York: 2004). His current research focuses on urban political culture and political identities in the Upper Rhine Valley from 1580 to 1730. Lee Palmer Wandel is Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Visual Culture at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She has just completed The Reformation: Towards a New History for Cambridge University Press and is continuing her work on catechisms.
MULTICONFESSIONALISM: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION Thomas Max Safley In the 16th century, Christianity blew apart. In what seemed to contemporaries a cataclysm, the speed and scope of which evoked forebodings of doom, the end of days, the unity of the Christian church and Christian worship came to an end.1 Yet, Christianity had a long history of fragmentation before the Reformation. Even in the first generation, the Council of Jerusalem or Apostolic Council, described in the Book of Acts, marked a potential parting of the ways, a fate avoided only at the last minute through Paul’s persuasive powers and Peter’s willingness to compromise.2 The East-West Schism, which resulted in the emergence of two great Christian traditions that would eventually become known as the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, involved a gradual separation over a number of issues that reached its climax in the mutual excommunications of the 11th century. It has not been entirely resolved to this day. In the 12th century the Waldensian movement coalesced around the person and teachings of Peter Waldo, who advocated lay preaching, voluntary poverty, and strict Biblicism as the essential elements of Christianity, and broke with Roman, papal authority only to suffer brutal persecution before retreating into the high valleys of the Piedmont. Isolated communities still exist. Similarly, the followers of Jan Hus took up their leader’s call for the strictly literal interpretation of the Bible, the no less strict limit on the authority of popes, and, most famously, the celebration of the Eucharist in both kinds, broke violently with Rome in the late-14th and early 15th centuries. They survive as the Moravian, Bohemian Brethren, and Czech Hussite churches. The process has accelerated over time. Christianity today comprises seven major blocks, 156 ecclesiastical traditions, and
1 I wish to thank Lee Palmer Wandel for sharing with me her manuscript, “The Reformation: Toward a New History,” forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. 2 Acts of the Apostles 15.
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over 22,000 denominations in varying degrees of communion or competition with each other.3 For all the tendency of Christians to divide against themselves, however, something of a consensus existed in the West during the Middle Ages. The Waldensians, Hussites, and a very few others survived only by retreating far into the wilderness or enlisting the armed protection of powerful patrons. Their embattled persistence proves their exceptional status. Such schismatics notwithstanding, the dominant Roman church relied successfully on a combination of coercion and compromise to fold periodic reforming movements back into itself. The Cistercians and the Franciscans, for example, remained orthodox for all the heterodox potential of their visions of true Christianity. This is not to say that the Church was itself static, applying fixed notions of authority or orthodoxy. Quite the contrary, as medievalists since Richard Southern have argued4, it existed in dynamic relationship to the political, social, and material circumstances of its day. Though its organization reached from the Curia romana via archdiocese and diocese to churches and chapels in nearly every corner of Europe, Christians perceived its authority variously, depending upon the articulations of power and the dictates of geography at the local level. Though the Gospels presented the life of Christ in relatively consistent fashion, they inspired the widest possible variety of imitations among clergy and laity. Though “orthodoxy” described the teachings of the Church, theologians actively discussed and debated its content with the result that it became less a straight-and-narrow path than a broad, occasionally murky zone. “Heresy” likewise applied less to clear deviations from the orthodox than to vague, because constantly shifting, attempts to practice a Christ-like life.5 But, such dynamism in no way prevented western Christians from reaching general agreement in the Middle Ages about what Christianity entailed. Allowing for a certain variation of detail and degree, they acknowledged the same authoritative
3 David Barrett et al. (eds.), World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World (Oxford: 1985), 15–18. 4 Richard Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London: 1970), passim. 5 See, for example, Grundmann’s classic argument in Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter; Untersuchungen über die geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religiösen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert, und über die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik, 2nd edition (Hildesheim: 1961).
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text, the same clerical hierarchy, the same liturgical calendar, and the same transcendent relationship. Despite all earlier movements of reform, of which there were many, Christians returning constantly to the Gospel well-spring for renewed perspective and conviction, the Reformation may thus be regarded as unprecedented. Prior to the 16th century, the range of issues that caused debate and division remained limited. Questions of papal authority, clerical discipline, Christian life, or theological interpretation arose at one point or another but seldom all at the same time. The Reformation included a cacophony of voices and a multitude of texts that questioned and addressed the entire range of Christian teaching and life: God’s nature, God’s relationship to creation, God’s revelation, Christian comportment, Christian worship, and Christian truth. It seemed that the entire Christian religion had come suddenly under assault or, viewed from the perspective of those seeking change, opened finally to renewal. Nor was the range of debate the only characteristic to set the Reformation apart. The 16th century witnessed a level of passion and violence that may well have seemed singular to those who lived through it. Violence marked, of course, the responses to Waldo and Hus and, so, obtained not only in the 16th century. But seldom had it reached such a pitch and ubiquity. The Reformation set neighbor against neighbor and parents against children, turned friends into foes and adversaries into allies, across the continent. Arguments gave way to blows, which easily provoked riots. Blood was shed and lives lost. Martyrs endured torment and death singing, rather than abjuring. Wars erupted in the Empire, France, and the Low Countries, when the passions of religion coincided with the interests of politics. Not only people but also objects fell victim as advocates of reform defiled consecrated Hosts, destroyed religious images, and desecrated sacred places, and defenders of tradition burned Bibles and interrupted sermons. Nor, finally, were those advocates of reform and renewal themselves unified, as all attempts to capture and describe them as a single group make them seem. Many, like Erasmus, saw a clear need for change, for a return to the imitation of Christ as portrayed in the Gospels, but refused to abandon the traditional, Roman Church that could claim a direct, unbroken succession from the apostles themselves. Those who insisted that a break with a tradition grown sinfully human in their eyes was inevitable and essential splintered into an ever-increasing number of sects and churches that often opposed one another as violently and passionately as they opposed the Church of Rome. The result was a growing multiplicity of confessions.
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The word, “confession,” in the sense both of a “confession” of sin and of a “profession” of faith, can be found in Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The early church used it to name statements of fundamental, Christian doctrine, and several such “confessions” appeared during the course of the Middle Ages. Yet, as Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss make clear, “it was with the Reformation of the sixteenth century that ‘confession of faith’ as a theological and literary form distinct from ‘creed’ came into its own and achieved dominance.”6 The sheer number and variety of these documents astonishes.7 Those that were not more personal in nature came to represent statements of eternal truth on such topics as Christology, theology, ecclesiology, liturgy, and morality for communities of Christians dispersed across a multiconfessional landscape. Historians have long recognized the growing number of confessions that mark the 16th century as early as the 1520s. Ernst Walter Zeeden wrote of Konfessionsbildung 8 as a process of internal, doctrinal, and liturgical innovation, the proliferation of statements or documents of varying form and content that identified churches that shared a given liturgy and theology. He was, however, less interested in the extraordinary number and variety of churches, a phenomenon hinted at by the Troeltschian morphology of George H. Williams,9 than in the growth or revival of what he understood as the central institutions of the Reformation, the Lutheran Church and the Roman Church. That such a thing could occur, that confessions could multiply despite opposition by the Roman church and persecution by secular magistrates, has to do in part with the nature of politics and in part with the process of reform in the 16th century. Both were highly fragmented. Political power remained vested in the person of the monarch. Councilors, advisors, officers, and servants did not command the same loyalty and obedience. Nor did they share the monarch’s sacral quality, a crucial consideration when the dispute centered upon religion. The personal nature of authority assumed even greater significance
6 Jaroslav Pelikan and Varie Hotchkiss (eds.), Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, vol. II: Reformation Era (New Haven: 2003), 4. 7 See Lee Palmer Wandel’s contribution to this volume. 8 Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Munich: 1964). 9 George H, Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: 1962).
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in a political landscape that was extraordinarily varied. Even in states that boasted relatively centralized governments and relatively professionalized bureaucracies—France and Britain come to mind—distance and privilege mitigated every exercise of power. In brief, the more distant a locality or community was from the person of the sovereign, the greater were the opportunities for resistance or prevarication. Moreover, many towns and provinces retained diverse rights of selfdetermination that could be used to slow or shape the projects and policies of central governments. In less centralized states, such as the Dutch Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, or the princedoms of Central Europe, territorial and civic authorities had constitutionally guaranteed powers of self-determination that they could exercise against the relatively under-developed organs of central authority. Complicating the matter still further, ecclesiastical lords claimed for themselves and their territories the authority of princes as well as the immunity of prelates. The consequence of these often far-removed, over-lapping, conflicting, and competing powers was the existence of interstices, in which multiple confessions might prosper. The processes, whereby confessions crystallized, contributed to the welter, too. The Imperial city of Augsburg, to take up a single example, experienced an unusually complicated series of reformations, attributable to many different impulses for religious renewal. The city was extraordinarily prosperous, a center of commerce, manufacturing, and finance, that not only fostered a local printing industry but also nourished a learned, literate, urban elite, well-versed in the intellectual and political developments of the day, at the same time that it created an immiserated, urban proletariat, resentful of wealth and display. Its residents gave voice to an inchoate yearning for religious renewal, a desire so widespread that, according to the chronicler, Hektor Mülich, Roman corruption and greed in the form of papal indulgences caused “a great murmuring among the people”10 as early as 1451 and, according to the historian, Friedrich Roth, much discontent, especially among thoughtful citizens in 1517.11 It was the see of Christoph von Stadion, elected Bishop of Augsburg in 1517, a cleric of Erasmian temperament, whose learning and tolerance may have enabled opposition and sectarianism 10
“fast ein groß Murmeln unter dem Volk”, Hektor Mülichs Chronik, 167, as quoted in Friedrich Roth, Augsburgs Reformationsgeschichte, 4 vols. (Munich: 1974), 1: 47. 11 Friedrich Roth, Augsburgs Reformationsgeschichte, 4 vols. (Munich: 1974), I: 47.
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to gain a foothold in the city.12 It was the site of the Reichstag of 1518, a glittering assembly of Imperial aristocrats, secular and ecclesiastical, that occasioned such nationalistic gushing from Ulrich von Hutten and drew Martin Luther barely a year after the posting of his theses to a meeting with supporters among the local elite as well as with the papal legate, Giacomo de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan.13 It was home to some of Luther’s earliest and most steadfast supports, including Johannes Frosch, the Prior of the Carmelite Convent of St. Anna, who encouraged the spread of the reformer’s writings in and beyond the city. It was likewise home, albeit briefly, to Johannes Oecolampadius, appointed Cathedral Preacher in 1518, whose sermons quickly awakened suspicion among Romanists that he was himself an evangelical, a suspicion that would be utterly confirmed in Basel during the 1530s. It was, once again, home to Oecolampadius’ replacement in 1520, the “Doctor of Theology, imperial orator and poet laureate,”14 Urbanus Rhegius, who, despite early opposition to reform, would prove to be Luther’s strongest, most vocal defender in the Cathedral of Our Lady. And, finally, it was the source for many of words and images, spread in pamphlets and broadsides that were printed in Augsburg, that peaked interest in religious renewal, excited attendance at the sermons of Oecolampadius and Rhegius, and encouraged acts of rebellion, such as the notorious, public marriage of the priest, Johannes Grießbeutel in 1522.15 Socioeconomic conditions, popular piety, ecclesiastical leadership, elite interests, great men, evangelical preaching, religious dissent, and civil disobedience all found their place in Augsburg, all contributed to a desire for reformation, and all led in multiple directions. No wonder that Luther wrote to Georg Spalatin in horror, “Augsburg is splintering in six directions!”16 The city was eventually forced to
12 It is at least worthy of note that Stadion recommended to the clergy and laity of his diocese a simple Christianity, based on Biblical precepts and examples, and the imitation of Christ as an effective response to the problems that beset church and society. This Erasmian sensibility was announced in 1517, the same year Luther made public his list of theses. Friedrich Zoepfl, Das Bistum Augsburg und seine Bischöfe im Reformationsjahrhundert (Augsburg: 1969), 12ff. Quoted in Herbert Immenkötter, “Kirche zwischen Reformation und Parität,” in Gunther Gottlieb et al. (eds.), Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg von der Römerzeit bis zur Parität (Stuttgart: 1985), 391–413. 13 Roth, Augsburgs Reformationsgeschichte, 1: 50–52. 14 Roth, Augsburgs Reformationsgeschichte, 1: 57. 15 Roth, Augsburgs Reformationsgeschichte, 1: 115–16. 16 “Augusta in sex divisa est sectas,” as quoted in Helmut Zschoch, “Augsburg zerfällt in sechs Richtungen! Frühkonfessioneller Pluralismus in den Jahren 1524 bis
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adopt two confessions as official, without inevitably expelling any of the others, but that process would take more than a century-and-ahalf. And, such varying, conflicting, complicating forces were at work everywhere. Multiconfessionalism, understood here as the legally recognized and politically supported coexistence of two or more confessions in a single polity, be it a city-state or territorial state, was the rule rather than the exception for most regions and polities that experienced Reformation. Dutch historians, of course, have long recognized the truth of this observation for their own country.17 Though the Reformed Church became the official church of the new Republic, membership was not compelled, and it remained a minority church amid a remarkable array of confessions. For all its accuracy, this relatively straightforward representation still obscures the varieties of structures and arrangements that existed in towns and estates across the Republic. Similarly, in the confederated amalgam of the Holy Roman Empire, each ruling authority obtained in 1555 the constitutional right to choose between the Augsburg or Roman confessions—a choice expanded in 1648 to include Calvinism—and make it the official church of their state.18 The congeries of princes and councils that ruled its several hundred territories and cities, in fact, accommodated multiple confessions, recognized religious minorities, or even, as Anton Schilling put it, “provided a constitutional guarantee of confessional parity.”19 Admittedly, most preferred and strove to achieve confessional uniformity, but local conditions often rendered that goal unattainable, if not inadvisable. The limits of political power and the dictates of local circumstance had interestingly analogous consequences in France.20 Catholics and Huguenots struggled ferociously to establish their confession as the sole, recognized church of the kingdom. Though capable of the greatest brutality in this endeavor, they were no less capable of limiting violence
1530” in Helmut Gier, R. Schwarz (eds.), Reformation und Reichsstadt—Luther in Augsburg. Ausstellung der Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg. Katalog (Augsburg: 1996), 78–95. 17 See Jesse Spohnholz’s contribution to this volume. 18 See David Luebke’s contribution to this volume. 19 Anton Schindling, “Neighbours of a Different Faith: Confessional Coexistence and Parity in the Territorial States and Towns of the Empire” in Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (eds.), 1648: War and Peace in Europe, 3 vols. (Münster: 1999), 1: 465–483, here 465. 20 See Keith Luria’s contribution to this essay.
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and coexisting peacefully in given places and at given times. Indeed, the monarchy attempted at points to fix in law and mediate through commissions a multiconfessional peace, based on loyalty to the crown. British sovereigns, too, pursued a multiconfessional state, if only after the Restoration and for reasons quite their own.21 The monarchical ambition to escape the trammels of the Anglican Church, to say nothing of Parliament, cannot obscure the fact that here, too, multiconfessionalism existed in difficult circumstances. Sixteenth-century rulers had attempted to create a confessional state in England, persecuting at times fiercely Catholics and separatists. During the Civil War, Cromwellian authority attempted to reverse this policy, encouraging and supporting a broader multiconfessionalism. As the state could at no time simply impose its will, the result was a negotiated compromise between confessional and multiconfessional extremes. Scotland and Ireland each reached a divergent settlement, consistent with their local circumstances. More complex than all of these—and, perhaps, most surprising to scholars of Western Europe—is the multiconfessionalism of Central Europe, with its complex political boundaries and its various ethnic communities.22 The object of repeated invasion and negotiation, its borders and, with them, its dynasties shifted dramatically over the course of the late Middle Ages and early modern period. This fluid condition allowed individuals and groups to move and resettle easily. Moreover, those people, both rulers and ruled, were politically, socially, ethnically, and, not incidentally, confessionally diverse. Under such circumstances, degrees of political decentralization or local selfdetermination were commonplace, promoting multiconfessionalism, whether as an act of policy or a concession to necessity. In consequence, the regions and polities of Central Europe harbored an astonishing spectrum of religions and confessions, including not only Catholics, Lutheran, and Calvinists, but also groups that would have been dismissed as every stripe of sectarian or Schwärmer, as well as varieties of Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others. Hence, early modern multiconfessionalism could be de jure or de facto or both, negotiated or imposed, permanent or temporary, local or regional, a conscious policy or an unwilling compromise, depending on local circumstances. Similar patterns applied to the territories of the Swiss Confederation,
21 22
See Bernard Capp’s contribution to this essay. See Howard Louthan’s contribution to this volume.
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might be discovered in the regions of Scandinavia, and could conceivably have survived even in the interstices of authority within the Catholic confessional states of Southern Europe. A commonplace for much of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, multiconfessionalism has nonetheless appeared to historians, if at all, only as a transient phase of religious and social life. They have generally assumed it to be a temporary accommodation that in time resolved itself in the creation of confessional states. This assumption owes much to the scholarship of Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, who coined the term “confessionalization.”23 In 1977, Reinhard argued for “the age of confessions,” so that “the schematic of chronological antithesis can be replaced by an image of parallel development and the concept of confessio, as understood in the sources, achieves both a church-historical as well as a social-historical interpretation.”24 He understood that the creation of confessions was far more than an internal matter for the church, affected far more than ecclesiastical structure, liturgical practice, or theological principle. It altered the bases of social interaction. In turn, Schilling developed the model of “confessionalization,” applied initially to German cities and states as “an internally consistent process resulting in the theological, ideological, and political formation of the three large confessional churches as well as their corresponding power blocs.”25 With that the notion moved into the political arena with the instrumentalization of confession for disciplinary purposes by confessional states. The sense of “an internally consistent process,” in which elites imposed an ideological and disciplinary regime seamlessly on a subject population, making confession the servant of policy and the state the protector and arbiter of religion, has not borne scrutiny. Recent scholarship on cultural exchange and transmission has raised the problem of reception, which, briefly put, posits that readers and listeners—the recipients, so to speak—do not passively absorb content, but rather
23 The literature on confessionalization is vast. For a lively and informative discussion, see http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/Confessionalization/Confess_index.htm. 24 Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 251. 25 Heinz Schilling, “Confessionalization in the Empire: Religious and Societal Change in Germany between 1555 and 1620” in idem, Religion, Political Culture, and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: 1992), 216–7.
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see or hear it through the filters of their own experience, aspirations, and assumptions.26 In similar fashion, the scholarship on statecraft and state-building in the early modern period has demonstrated that the modern state did not emerge in a direct, top-down process, whereby the center imposed its authority and ideology on the provinces and the periphery, but rather grew out of an uneven process of negotiation and compromise, in which subject territories and peoples managed to defend their particular interests and, thus, deflect political structures and practices. The ubiquity of multiconfessionalism has also broadened the original scope of Konfessionsbildung, taking it well beyond the ecclesiastical and political to the social and cultural. Confessional affiliation was not only a matter of police action, political calculation, or ethnic affiliation, but also a matter of daily experience. With whom did one have contact as neighbor, colleague, friend, or relative? What were one’s social station, occupational group, and political connection? Did one reside among multiple confessional groups, and, if so, what was the nature of one’s interaction with them? The answers to these questions influenced confessional choice. And, confessional choice influenced, even altered, the answers to these question, implications that neither Zeeden nor Reinhard and Schilling considered. One of the first to do so was Etienne François in his path-breaking book, Die unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg, 1648–1806.27 It offers, by way of example, a sense of the range of scholarly possibilities and questions, when one replaces mechanical theories of coercion and reaction with complex models of contingency and interaction. Francois focused on the so-called “invisible boundary” that existed in the city of Augsburg, one of the Imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire in which parity had been established by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. A Catholic minority received the legal guarantee of equal access to public offices and resources with the Evangelical majority, a fascinating early exercise in separate-butequal. Each also retained the right to undisturbed public worship. He proceeded to examine these two communities, comparing them to one another and observing how they influenced one another in a variety of
26
See Lee Wandel’s contribution to this volume. Etienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg, 1648–1806 (Sigmaringen: 1991). 27
introduction
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ways. He demonstrated that migration patterns affected the structure of each confessional community. Catholics moved to Augsburg from the neighboring countryside, whereas Evangelicals migrated from more distant cities. Marriage patterns tended to reinforce this ruralurban divide, but the difference tended to recede, as each community influenced the demographic structures and behaviors of the other, an instance of confessional dialectic. Likewise the social and occupational divergences between Catholics and Evangelicals converged over time. He concludes, “Catholics and Lutherans constituted ‘two different societies . . . that which bound was stronger than that which divided.”28 Confessional relations left their strongest mark, however, in the world of culture, specifically, in the shaping of mentalité. Francois called the confessional polemics of the age a ritualized “theater of confrontation” that strengthened internal cohesion and stabilized exterior relations. In a truly innovative step, he turned to naming practices and showed how they tended to become endogenous, Catholics increasingly giving their children Catholic names, that is, the names of saints, and Lutherans giving their children Lutheran names, names from Scripture. He thus demonstrated that confessional identification became internalized even as the external markers of confessional difference tended to disappear. As social and legal structures that differentiated dissolved, a consciousness of difference remained, a truly invisible boundary. The presence of multiple confessions became itself an essential spur to confessional identification. The process of confessional identification—what one might call the individual or micro-mechanics of Konfessionsbildung has received considerable attention from scholars since the publication of François’s book. Frauke Volkland, to take up another example in somewhat greater detail, shows some of the new insights that can result from this research.29 Early modern Bischofszell was a small city in the Swiss Canton of Thurgau. It was biconfessional, harboring Reformed and Catholic communities, and its political structures and authorities did not intervene too massively in confessional relations, making it an excellent contrast to the confessionalization paradigm. Volkland offers detailed analyses of three incidents. First, in its festival of
28
François, Die unsichtbare Grenze, 140. Frauke Volkland, Konfession und Selbstverständnis: Reformierte Rituale in der gemischtkonfessionellen Kleinstadt Bischofszell im 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: 2005). 29
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“Hohlensteigtag” the town commemorated its communal salvation in 1407, but each confession celebrated separately.30 Second, in 1677, a gang of Reformed youths disturbed the Corpus Christi procession but escaped legal sanction because their disturbance took a cleverly indirect, musical form and because their excuses were supported by cleverly manipulated, witness testimony. Third, in a series of conversions, events were shaped not only by civic policies but also and equally by social contexts, familial tensions, and economic ambitions. Though the study offers evidence of fixed, accepted confessional boundaries that separated the two communities, it borrows from the work of Clifford Geertz to suggest as well the existence of a “common religiocultural system” that was recognized and shared by both communities and largely independent of the state.31 Volkland rejects the notion of confessional identity, which she believes has been oversimplified as a top-down consequence of confessionalization, in favor of a dialectical relationship between “confession and self-image,” which she interprets as a consequence of daily interaction. She suggests by way of consequence that confessional states, when and where they emerged, may have been the consequence not of state policy alone but of the daily discourse of multiple confessions. Current scholarship has established the fact that multiconfessionalism was far more common in the 16th and 17th centuries than the traditional historical narrative, be it of the Age of Reformation or the Age of Confession, would have its disciples believe. That multiconfessionalism could be sustained from below as a necessary consequence of co-residence and coexistence in a single community. It could also be imposed from above as a conscious political policy. That most authorities in the 16th and 17th centuries assumed that religious unity—confessional uniformity—was essential to political stability. As the essays of this volume make clear, however, many nations rejected persecution in favor of some form of coexistence. Indeed, even some persecuting states embraced multiconfessionalism. This realization is relatively young, but its influence is noticeable.
30
Frauke Volkland, Konfession und Selbstverständnis, 49. “Religiöse Konversionen werden dann nicht primär unter dem Vorzeichen eines konfessionell-antagonistischen Modells, sondern vor dem Hintergrund eines den Konfessionen zumindest teilweise gemeinsamen religiös-kulturellen Systems verstanden.” Frauke Volkland, Konfession und Selbstverständnis, 181. 31
introduction
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It has forced scholars to reconsider the nature of Konfessionsbildung and Konfessionalisierung. States did not universally—much less uniformly—take up confession as a tool of policy. Moreover, confessional states often adopted, whether temporarily or permanently, openly or tacitly, willingly or unwillingly, a latitudinarian posture regarding heterodoxy within their borders. Augsburg is a prime example, but by no means the only one. While confessional unity might have been thought essential to political stability in principle, multiconfessional coexistence was often understood as the key to political survival in practice. Both the articulation of power within and the constellation of forces without could compel the infant, modern state, so-called, to pay lip-service to confessional unity while allowing confessional diversity, a policy more reminiscent of Machiavelli than Botero. The essays of this volume demonstrate this pattern again and again. They focus to a very large extent on ecclesio-political relations, what one might call multiconfessionalism at the vertical macro-level. They are, at least in their present form, less concerned with the influence of a plurality of confessions on the perceptions and actions of individuals and groups among themselves, than with the interactions between confessional groups and the governing authorities above them. In the Dutch Republic, William of Orange maneuvered among the many confessional groups in each of the estates in an attempt to hold together an anti-Habsburg, anti-Spanish alliance.32 The city government of Antwerp steered similarly among the pushes of various, resident, confessional groups and the pulls of various, external, superior authorities.33 The study of multiconfessionalism in the Holy Roman Empire remains likewise focused on the politics of confession. The city government of Colmar in Alsace, like those of many other communities, sought to balance the demands of and ease the tensions between its confessional constituencies while mollifying—and, thus, prevent intervention by—at turns the Holy Roman Emperor or the King of France.34 Meanwhile, Imperial knights along the Mosel, Rhine, and Main rivers as well as in the Prince-Bishoprics struggled to exercise independently the ius reformandi within their own estates and at the same time to serve loyally their confessional overlords.35 French 32 33 34 35
See Benjamin Kaplan’s contribution to this volume. See Guido Marnef ’s contribution to this volume. See Peter Wallace’s contribution to this volume. See Richard Ninness’ contribution to this volume.
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towns and territories offer an even more complex image of confessional relations. As noted, local authorities strove with surprising frequency— surprising, because France was not a “loose state structure”36 but rather a relatively centralized state—and noteworthy success to maintain peaceful, neighborly relations between Catholics and Huguenots, sometimes with and sometimes without the support of the monarch.37 The at times bewildering pattern of their successes and failures reflected shifting local circumstances. That pattern also reflected a degree of interaction between local and central authorities and, more surprisingly still, between local subjects and the representatives of central authority.38 Thus, France, in many ways the most “modern” and confessional of early modern states, most directly confounds the top-down, pacification paradigm of confessionalization. Britain, too, only superficially fits the model. The crown failed to impose either confessionalism or multiconfessionalism on its subjects. Many political thinkers and actors held against the commonplace nostrum that unity meant stability the firm conviction that multiconfessionalism would better promote political vigor and economic prosperity in the nation.39 And in Ireland, at first glance another confessional state in its apparently neat alignment of political and theological power, the non-enforcement of confessional legislation meant Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and sectarians could and did live as neighbors throughout the early modern period.40 Central Europe, by contrast, remained decentralized, especially in comparison to France or Britain, and thus unable to impose or enforce consistently any kind of confessional arrangement. That does not mean, however, that only local politics mattered. In cities like Wilno (Vilnius), the city government and its policies established a framework for multiconfessional relations in the day-to-day, within which the city’s five confessional communities largely arranged themselves.41 Again, interaction is a useful concept, as it is in Transylvania, where rulers came to recognize the political necessity of maintaining a multiconfessional state and society and enacted this conviction in
36 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge MA: 2007), 232. 37 See Penny Roberts’ contribution to this volume. 38 See Jérémie Foa’s contribution to this volume. 39 See John Coffey’s contribution to this volume. 40 See Raymond Gillispie’s contribution to this volume. 41 See David Frick’s contribution to this volume.
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discourse with their own subjects and neighboring powers.42 Confessionalization strictu sensu simply does not work. Authorities seldom imposed confessions as religio-political ideologies on their subjects; where they attempted to do so, they were often forced to negotiate and compromise. Nor did those subjects simply yield to compulsion and embrace the state’s confession, but rather they often convinced their rulers not to prohibit heterodox groups or, perhaps more importantly still, instrumentalized their rulers’ confessional ambitions for their own very different purposes. Yet, such studies as are presented in this volume, with their attention to political discourse and action between capital and province or locality, confirm that the social and cultural aspects of confessional relations cannot be understood apart from their political contexts. These are crucial and original insights, but the potential for further, original research remains very great, as will become apparent. For all their attention to ecclesio-political relations, these articles refine and, in many instances, confound the familiar, accepted tropes of negotiation, pacification, or confessionalization. They offer withal a much more complex picture of political, social, and religious relations in early modern Europe. In nearly every instance, superior authority negotiated not only formally but also informally with inferior officeholders and non-official groups of various sorts. This fact alone blurs and, occasionally, obliterates the already vague dichotomy of public and private in the early modern period. Negotiation merged into a continuum of quotidian discussion and accommodation, with initiatives coming from below as well as above, not only in localities like Antwerp, Colmar, Nantes, and Wilno, but also in territorial states like Gelderland, Bamberg, Ireland, and Transylvania. Pacification likewise proceeded in a variety of ways, resulting from the pressures exerted by superior authority, as in the Dutch Republic or French Kingdom, from the maneuvers of local groups or corporations, as in Ireland or Transylvania, or the accommodations based on common interests across confessional lines, as in nearly every polity examined. Confessionalization, perhaps most surprisingly of all, could just as easily yield “pluriformity” as uniformity of religious practice. And, indeed, this was as often the intended result, all claims by the ruling authorities of the political necessity of uniformity notwithstanding, as it was the unintended but unavoidable outcome. These essays emphasize as well
42
See Graeme Murdock’s contribution to this volume.
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the defining nature of locality itself. In every instance, local factors, such as the distance from and relationship to superior authority, legal and political privileges and immunities, socio-economic structures and relations, ethnic and occupational constitution, historical tradition and identity, to name but a very few, determined the quality of confessional relations to such an extent that it becomes possible to speak of multiconfessionalism as a model or paradigm only the broadest possible terms. The local nature of multiconfessionalism, whether as political desiderata or lived experience, suggests the rich possibilities for historical exploration on the horizontal, micro-level. That the contributors have not to quite the same extent taken up questions of the relations among and within confessional groups may be a function of the “newness” of the topic. Attention to macrohistory is at least partially a consequence of the dominance and discontent of confessionalization. Many scholars have come to recognize multiconfessionalism as a (more) frequent consequence of Reformation because of their initial engagement with the older paradigm. It compels a certain attention to large structures and patterns before turning to finer points of action and interaction. It may also be a function of the organization of this volume. Even the best written essays, because of their necessary brevity, do not have the scope for a discussion of complex, contingent phenomena. They sketch an outline and hint at consequences. Many of the contributors to this volume are currently engaged in work of this sort as, indeed, their essays suggest. One recurrent theme addresses the function of boundaries and spaces in shaping confessional relations. Whether in the division and distribution of churches in cities like Colmar or Wilno or in the presence or absence of confessional groups within neighborhoods or districts, clear boundaries and defined spaces promoted good neighborliness. Moreover, as became apparent in French cities despite the worst excesses of confessional violence, the concept of neighborliness could trump notions of pollution. Many of the essays raise either directly of indirectly questions of identity. It is broadly assumed that confessional identity superseded all other forms, dissolving domestic, civic, national, or ethnic unity. Yet, as close studies of Dutch, German, French, Irish, and Central European communities demonstrate again and again, and as the analysis of toleration literature likewise confirms, this was by no means always or automatically the case. In Antwerp, the contributions of a multiconfessional mercantile community to the prosperity of the entire
introduction
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city—the identification of that community with the city—served to justify coexistence in the eyes of city fathers. In Bamberg, identification with a particular family or estate caused confessional dictates to be set aside, enabling Evangelical office-holders and Catholic princebishops to cooperate in the governance of their realms. In French cities and Irish towns as well, citizens and councilors argued from a long history of coexistence and cooperation to deflect confessional conflict. In Wilno, a long history of residency and the civic identity that arose from it justified the continued coexistence of confessional groups, each in its own neighborhood, sometimes in close proximity, despite confessional tension and agitation within the city’s bounds. These and other topics suggest that the possibilities for future research are far from exhausted. Attention to multiconfessionalism may also have influenced the very recent attention to toleration. Long regarded as a unique feature of Western civilization, religious toleration is a topic that has enjoyed a venerable history. European scholars have traditionally relegated the topic of toleration to intellectual history, examining it as an exercise in the linear development and filiation of an idea from its original source in the religious conflicts of the Reformation to its modern apotheosis in the Enlightenment.43 So understood, the rise of toleration reflects the triumph of rationality. More recently, historians have turned to the quotidian interactions and experiences of people caught up in multiconfessional situations. Their studies reflect the breadth of that experience from horrifying violence to muted coexistence,44 an altogether more complex model that grounds toleration in its contemporary context and avoids the anachronistic projection of modern
43 Among the standard treatments of the intellectual history of religious toleration are W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 1932) and Joseph Lecler, Toleration and the Reformation, trans. T. L. Westow, 2 vols. (New York: 1960). See also Henry Kamen, The Rise of Religious Toleration (New York: 1967); Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, UK: 1996); Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter (eds.), Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, UK: 2000). 44 Some important works include: Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays by Natalie Zemon Davis (Stanford: 1975), 152–188; R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Hapsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700 (Oxford: 1979); R. Po-chia Hsia, Society and Religion in Münster, 1535–1618 (New Haven: 1984); Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York: 1991); Gregory Hanlon, Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia: 1993), 1–16, 262–280.
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tropes.45 Much of this scholarship has concentrated, not surprisingly, on the Dutch Republic, especially the estate of Holland, which contemporaries recognized as one of the most openly tolerant societies in early modern Europe.46 Despite the official recognition of the Dutch Reformed Church, a confession not famous for its indulgence of heterodoxy, political elites curbed confessional tendencies in favor of a public order marked by the coexistence of Protestant confessions and the marginalization of the Catholic.47 As Charles Parker aptly put it, “In practice, therefore, toleration is better understood as the accommodation of dissent in societies organized around the ideal of religious unity.”48 Under such circumstances, toleration may not be an apt expression. Burdened as it is with modern notions of religious freedom, according to which confessional identification and affiliation are private matters beyond the purview of the state, some more general notion of accommodation or coexistence might be preferable. The point is not to settle terminological debates, but rather to point out a more commonplace occurrence. Even in Holland, toleration, so-called, involved not religious equality or freedom but rather the sufferance of multiple confessions with some privileged and others disadvantaged. Nor was this practice limited to the Low Countries. The essays in this volume demonstrate quite clearly that coexistence, if not toleration, was far 45 Benjamin J. Kaplan, “ ‘Dutch’ Religious Tolerance: Celebration and Revision” in R. Po-chia Hsia and Henk van Nierop (eds.), Calvinisim and Religious Toleration in the Golden Age (Cambridge, UK: 2002), 22–26. David Nirenburg argues that toleration and violence were interdependent. See David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: 1996). 46 Some important recent contributions to this broad literature include C. Berkiens-Stevelinck, J. Israel, and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (eds.), The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden: 1997); J. Israel, “Toleration in SeventeenthCentury Dutch and English Thought” in S. Groenveld and M. Winde (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands, vol. 11, (Zutphen: 1994), 25–27; Martin van Gelderen, Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt (Cambridge, UK: 1992); Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2007). 47 See the essays in Hsia and van Nierop, Calvinism and Religious Toleration, as well as C. C. Hibben, Gouda in Revolt: Particularism and Pacificism in the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1572–1588 (Utrecht: 1983); Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford: 1995); Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leidens Reformation, 1572–1620 (Leiden: 2000). 48 Charles H. Parker, “Paying for the Privilege: The Management of Public Order and Religious Pluralism in Two Early Modern Societies,” Journal of World History 17 (2006): 267–96, esp. 268.
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more common than historians have generally assumed. In Central Europe, especially Poland-Lithuania and Transylvania, a legal coexistence of multiple confessions obtained that most contemporaries understood as comparable to the Dutch practice. Taken as a whole, the Holy Roman Empire was constitutionally a bi- or triconfessional state, even though most, but not all, of its constituent cities and territories were confessional. Multiconfessionalism could persist in the interstices nonetheless, as close studies are just beginning to show.49 France and Britain sought at various points in time to promote as a matter of policy a confessional state and society, but neither of them succeeded entirely. Even the most confessional of states may have had to accommodate multiple confessions. The realization that multiconfessionalism was a common and, in some places, permanent consequence of the Reformation has led to a reconsideration of many aspects of that historical event. Rather than contribute to, it complicates the supposedly linear development of the “modern” state that the paradigm of confessionalization appropriates from Max Weber. State-building was a discursive process, involving rulers and subjects, capitals and provinces. It likewise complicates the triumphalist narratives of confessional histories of the Reformation. As important as the Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist confessions were, a host of others accompanied, supported, and challenged them. It contradicts the easy assumption that human history comprises nothing more than a mechanical working-out of non-human social or cultural forces. Acting singly or jointly, the members of confessional groups made choices about their religious lives that were contingent responses to local circumstances. The process of revision has just begun. The essays of this volume suggest both the ground that has been won and the ways yet to be traveled.
49 New, forthcoming research on the territory of Swabia and its Imperial cities, above all Augsburg, indicate that confessional policies did not necessarily prevent multiconfessionalism. Prescription is not description.
PART ONE
CONFESSIONS
CONFESSIONS Lee Palmer Wandel The fragmentation of Christendom in the 16th century engendered an ocean of words: sermons and songs, treatises and diatribes, testimonies and accusations. People seized words to articulate what they held to be “true Christianity,” the way “to honor God,” the relationship of Christ to humankind. And as those words were uttered or printed, others attacked them—for their imprecision, for their falseness, for the ways they misled. Lay men and women spoke of Christ’s sacrifice and atonement for all humankind. Priests spoke of the sacrifice of the altar. Martin Luther called for every Christian to be able to recite the Ten Commandments. John Calvin taught a different numbering of the Commandments. A multitude of texts accelerated that fragmentation, as sermons, liturgies, catechisms, treatises, satires, dialogues, plays, and confessions took up words, clauses, sentences, to articulate what their authors held to be true: about the nature of God; Christ’s two natures, divine and human; God’s relationship to humankind; the nature of worship, how one honored God, in the language of the time; how one should live in the world as a Christian. Hundreds of texts engendered angry responses. More texts. In that sea of words, one genre sought to be both durable and comprehensive: confessions. Unlike diatribes and hundreds of treatises, confessions were not intended to be polemical—with its particular construction of bipolarities and its reduction of opponents to risible caricatures. They were not framed in relationship to any opponent, straw or real, against whom they formulated positions. None drew upon the weapons of satire: irony, exaggeration, caricature. Unlike sermons and dialogues, their function was not proselytizing. Confessions did not seek to convince: to move through their rhetoric the mind or heart of their readers. They did not need to: the relationship of author, text, and reader was singular. Most broadly defined, confessions were “professions of faith,” the declaration of what the author or authors held to be true, absolutely and unconditionally. More than any other kind of text, confessions arose from the epistemology of revealed truth. For their authors,
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their truths were self-evident: they needed neither proving nor any human rhetorical devices to demonstrate their truth. Some, such as Hans Denck’s, were formulated in the first person singular: “I believe.” Others spoke in the first person plural: “we believe.” Still others stated the tenets of their doctrine without reference to any subject. No matter the voice, however, the truths articulated in the text were not held to be subjective: while authors of confessions “believed” them or set them to paper, for them, those truths existed autonomously of any human being. The author of the text bound himself to those truths by setting them to paper, but they did not depend upon him. No matter the size or shape, “confessions” shared the claim to state what was true absolutely—for the author, for a small group gathered in a single place in a particular moment, for persons scattered across the face of the globe, for all persons in all places in all times. For their authors, their truths held no matter where they were, who was reading them, under what conditions. While they varied in length from a few pages to small books, all sought to be comprehensive. Most encompassed statements of theology, christology, anthropology, ecclesiology, liturgy, and ethics. Some, such as The Belgic Confession, circulated in manuscript before being printed. Some remained manuscript. As printed objects they did not all have the same heft or look. They shared no particular order: most, but not all, began with God. But all sought to encompass those points of doctrine their authors held essential to “true Christianity.” The confessions that became supralocal and transregional struck a singular balance—something different from those personal statements, such as Denck’s confession or Huldrych Zwingli’s Sixty-Seven Articles or Fidei ratio, that were influential, but not definitive of the dispersed “Churches”1 of the 16th century. Frequently written in the rapidly changing political landscape of Europe, many in direct response to a particular moment, confessions that came to serve as definitive of Churches consisted of durable statements that resonated as true for diverse Christians, for Christians who were splintering from one another. The authors found the words that Christians in La Rochelle and Picardy, or Augsburg and Wittenberg, or Amsterdam and Antwerp found “true,” abidingly, unconditionally.
1 In this essay, Churches capitalized refers to those transregional communities who acquired both definition and institutional stability in the Reformation.
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Confessions and Confessionalization When Ernst Walter Zeeden published Die Entstehung der Konfessionen in 1964,2 he spoke of “konfessionell unterschiedener Kirchentypen” [confessionally differentiated types of Churches]. He was using the term as it came to be understood after the 16th century, as designating a group or “Church,” who shared a liturgy, a catechism, and a set of statements of theological, christological, liturgical, and ethical positions. Zeeden himself was concerned with the process by which the Lutheran “territorial Church” was formed and Catholicism rebuilt after the Reformation. Wolfgang Reinhardt and Heinz Schilling put the term “confessionalization” into circulation.3 In 1977, Reinhardt argued for “the age of confessions,” in which The movement of the “Counter-Reformation” takes part in the modernization of European society parallel to and often in competition with the Reformation. Once again, “Confessional Age” is recommended as a superior periodization, because the scheme of chronological antitheses can be replaced with a notion of parallel development, and the concept of “Confessio”, understood in conformity with the sources, achieves not only a church historical but also a social historical meaning.4
In his work, Schilling developed the model of “confessionalization”: “I understand the confessionalization of German cities and territories to be an internally consistent process resulting in the theological, ideological, and political formation of the three large confessional churches as well as their corresponding power blocs.”5 That sense of a relatively consistent process, in which elites both political and clerical inculcate populations, has been eroded through scholarship, foremost on early modern states and on the problem of
2 Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Munich and Vienna: 1964). 3 For a recent discussion of this “paradigm,” see http://www.h-net.org/~german/ discuss/Confessionalization/Confess_index.htm. 4 Wolfgang Reinhardt, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 251. Translated by editor. 5 Heinz Schilling, “Confessionalization in the Empire: Religious and Societal Change in Germany between 1555 and 1620” in Religion, Political Culture, and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: 1992), 216–7.
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“reception.” Research on the empire, principalities, free imperial cities, and kingdoms has revealed they were less efficient and faced far more effective opposition, resistance, adaptation, and negotiation. Studies of preaching and printing have differentiated audiences and readerships in the plural—not simply elite and popular, but emigree and local, Francophone and Genevois, rural and urban. Texts are, in Thomas Greene’s wonderful word, “vulnerable,” open to multiple readings, as studies of biblical exegesis, foremost, have shown. The uniformities that underlie the model of “confessionalization”—of dissemination and reception, of coercion and acquiescence—cannot be sustained in the face of the differentiation of political authorities and administrations, listeners and readers. Oddly, most studies of “confessionalization” do not look directly at the texts of confessions themselves, either as a genre or as the printed object that grounded the Churches of the later-16th century and afterwards. They do not consider the ways the texts themselves might have participated, even precipitated the process: through the genre of confessions, through voice, through the process of formulation, through the notion of “signing,” and through the emergence of confessions as the document by which persecuting authorities often identified divergent Christians. The word, “confession,” can be found in both Old and New Testaments.6 In the Book of Daniel, for instance, “I prayed to the LORD my God and made confession, saying, ‘O Lord, the great and terrible God, who keepest covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments’ ” [9:4]. Paul uses the word twice in the Epistle to Timothy, and three times in the Epistle to the Hebrews, for instance: “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession” [4:14].7 In the early church it was used to name documents which
6 The same word was used to name the first part of the sacrament of penance, when the penitent made a public statement—at first to all those gathered, by the end of the 15th century, to a priest—of sins mortal and venial that he or she had committed since last confessing. This act initiated a process of atonement, in which the penitent first acknowledged sinning, then the priest assigned specific acts of penitence, upon completion of which, then, the penitent was absolved. The Council of Trent affirmed this process in its 14th session in 1551. See Norman P. Tanner, S. J. (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. II (London: 1990), 703–18. 7 Revised Standard Version: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/r/rsv/ [accessed 14 December 2009].
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stated core tenets of Christian doctrine, such as those of Ulphilas and Eunomius in 383. Prior to the 16th century, western and eastern Christians had formulated a number of “confessions,” which shared with creeds the statement of what those confessing “believed.” According to Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss In spite of some precedents in earlier formularies, most notably in such documents as The Decree for the Armenians of the Council of Florence of 22 November 1439, it was with the Reformation of the sixteenth century that ‘confession of faith’ as a theological and literary form distinct from ‘creed’ came into its own and achieved dominance.8
Perhaps the greatest difference from earlier centuries is the sheer number of confessions and confessional texts in the 16th century. In his anthology, Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche, E. F. Karl Müller gathered some 43 texts from Zwingli’s Sixty-Seven Articles to the Canons of the Synod of Dort. In their anthology, Pelikan and Hotchkiss collect some 24 texts that bear the name “Confession,” in addition all those, such as Zwingli’s Articles, that do not. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, in addition to the Confession that bears the name of the Diet, two other confessions, The Tetrapolitan and Zwingli’s Fidei ratio, were also presented. For Pelikan and Hotchkiss, “the age of confessions” encompasses thousands of pages of texts, from which they have selected some 800 pages as representative, but not exhaustive. So, too, “confessions” as printed objects that circulated were new to the 16th century. Print was a relatively new medium, allowing divergent voices a form that gave their words wide circulation and a certain stability. Denck’s Confession, for instance, written at the behest of the Nuremberg City Council, circulated among Anabaptists, shaping subsequent formulations. As printed object, different confessions could circulate in new ways: not simply or even primarily through official channels of promulgation, but hand to hand. As printed object, confessions could move clandestinely, their content providing the touchstone for scattered communities under the cross, so that they saw themselves as connected to a larger “Church,” transregional, supralocal, bound by faith in the precisely formulated sentences of
8 Jaroslav Pelikan and Varie Hotchkiss (eds.), Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, vol. II: Reformation Era (New Haven: 2003), 4.
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their confession. As confessions circulated, a number formed communities of dispersed Christians, and communities that might not—in stark contrast to the imperial intent at Nicaea—have had legal recognition at all. Sixteenth-century confessions emerged in a different world from that of Nicaea. No emperor convened an ecumenical church council in the 16th century, in which divergent voices might have found ways of speaking that bridged their differences. The Augsburg, French, and Belgic Confessions were all formulated by religious minorities facing sovereigns who sought their eradication.9 The Scots Confession, The Thirty-Nine Articles, and The Westminster Confession were in some ways closer to the Nicene Creed: actively supported by, respectively, the Scots Parliament, Queen Elizabeth I, and the Long Parliament, these were political documents as well as statements of faith, efforts to unify subjects as much as to declare truths.10 At Nicaea, there was one acknowledged sovereign, the Roman Emperor Constantine. In 16th-century Europe, there were kings and an emperor, princes and magistrates. Even as the Emperor supported fully the Church that had been defined in important ways at Nicaea, and even as he longed for the same clarity of imperial power, he did not possess it: his power could neither unify the Church nor suppress divergent voices. Thus, in the 16th century, “confessions” were not the product of an ecumenical council, called to restore unity. Multiple confessions emerged, around which communities did form, but they formed around them in ways inseparable from the fragmented political landscape of 16th-century Europe. No one factor explains how some became normative, some not. The Augsburg, Tetrapolitan, and Second Helvetic Confessions, as well as The Thirty-Nine Articles were all written in direct response to the request from sympathetic temporal lords for a statement of doctrine.
9 On the history of the Augsburg Confession, see Wilhelm Maurer, Historischer Kommentar zur Confessio Augustana, 2 vols. (Gütersloh: 1976, 1978); and Michael Reu, The Augsburg Confession: A Collection of Sources with An Historical Introduction (Chicago: 1930). On the history of the French Confession, see Jacques Pannier, Les origines de la confession de foi et la discipline des Eglises réformées de France (Paris: 1936). On the Belgic Confession, see Nicolaas Gootjes, The Belgic Confession: Its History and Sources (Grand Rapids: 2007). 10 On The Thirty-Nine Articles, see Green, E. Tyrrell. The Thirty-Nine Articles and The Age of Reformation: An Historical and Doctrinal Exposition in the Light of Contemporary Documents (London: 1896).
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The Tetrapolitan Confession proved transient, despite the support of the governments of Strasbourg, Memmingen, Constance, and Lindau. The Augsburg Confession proved durable, despite the minority of its supporters at the Diet. The Second Helvetic Confession continues to serve as a core text for the the Bohemian Brethren in the Czech Republic, the Christian Reformed Church, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, the Reformed Church in America, and the Reformed Church of Hungary.11 The Schleitheim, French, and Belgic Confessions were written by persecuted minorities. The Belgic Confession first circulated underground among a persecuted minority; only two copies of its original text survived the order to burn them; and yet, it was adopted in Antwerp (1566), Wessel (1568), Emden (1571), Dort (1574), and Middelburg (1581), before being revised and adopted at the Synod of Dort in 1618–19 as one of three defining statements of faith for the Dutch Reformed Church. The confessions about which we know anything moved from hand to hand, place to place, community to community. Like Augustine’s Confessions, these confessions moved from the “I” or “we,” who held the statements to be true, outward to unknown, faceless readers. Unlike many printed texts, most confessions stipulated neither who their readers should be nor how the texts were to be read. As we know of The Augsburg and Belgic Confessions, they circulated clandestinely as well as publicly, the paths of their clandestine circulation largely unknown to this day.12 They were not, in other words, narrowly official documents promulgated by governments, but texts, primarily printed, that circulated with the same freedoms and constraints of other texts: prohibited in some places, promulgated in others, read clandestinely in some places, read aloud in public fora in others. In gathering together personal statements as well as texts that became normative for regional and transregional communities, and organizing them into “traditions,” anthologies of “Confessions” or Bekenntnisschriften, such as Pelikan and Hotchkiss, illumine a number of the ways 16th-century confessions were intertextual.13 They enable
11
Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions, II, 458. See, for example, Gootjes, The Belgic Confessions, Chapter 1. 13 In addition to Pelikan and Hotchkiss, see E. F. Karl Müller (ed.), Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche (Leipzig: 1903); J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink, De Nederlandsche Belijdenisgeschriften (Amsterdam: 1940). 12
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us to see where texts that became collectively normative drew upon personal statements such as Denck’s Confession or Zwingli’s SixtySeven Articles. The confessions of those who came to be organized in the Lutheran and Reformed Churches frequently cited both biblical sources and creeds and confessions of the early Church; anthologies allow us to see more precisely the contours of those citations. So, too, anthologies allow us to see how definitive Confessions— The Augsburg, French, Belgic, Scots, and Second Helvetic Confessions, The Thirty-Nine Articles of England, and The Tridentine Profession of Faith—both explicitly and implicitly situated themselves within textual communities and textual traditions. Each was embedded in textual traditions. The Augsburg Confession was a revision of the Schwabach and Torgau Articles. The Thirty-Nine Articles drew upon The Thirteen Articles of 1538, The Six Articles of 1543, The Forty-Two Articles of 1553, and The Eleven Articles of 1559–60. All confessions, printed and manuscript, first person and impersonal, circulated within the stunning proliferation of words—statements, declarations, professions, exhortations—of the 16th century. Their positions sometimes echoed positions first promulgated in sermons or treatises. Liturgies placed in repeated practice the biblical references and the gloss on the ritual that confessions stated. Catechisms and confessions shared particular wordings of doctrine, each expressly reinforcing the “orthodoxy” of the other. Through catechisms and liturgies, those passages they shared with confessions became familiar, embedded in the different rhythms of catechesis or worship. Unique in voice and organization, professing absolute truths, confessions were linked through sentences, framings of positions, to other kinds of texts, at once articulating truths independent of the rhythms of daily life and resonating in sermons or rituals of worship or catechesis. A number of confessions revised prior formulations to meet contemporary demands. In 1566, for example, Frederick III, Elector Palatinate, who had commissioned the Heidelberg Catechism, was dissatisfied with all the confessions then in circulation and called for Heinrich Bullinger to draft a new one, The Second Helvetic Confession. While Bullinger was the sole author, and seems to have written The Confession without consulting anyone else, he found formulations that resonated: Geneva, Bern, Chur, Biel, and Mühlhausen—each of whom had endorsed an earlier Confession—all agreed to The Second Helvetic Confession by the end of the year. Some confessions underwent revisions after publication. Philipp Melanchthon, for instance, revised The
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Augsburg Confession again and again; in 1580, the Council of Concord set as canonical the iteration published in 1531.14 As Melanchthon’s revisions or the Elector Frederick’s request suggests, no confession achieved the fixed status of a canonical text, until, arguably, The Book of Concord stabilized the text of The Augsburg Confession in 1580. Insofar as authors left any traces of the process of formulation, those traces suggest that the authors of The Augsburg, French, and Helvetic Confessions, and The Thirty-Nine Articles sought to find the way of speaking that could form between splintered groups a common, shared, and therefore unifying understanding of God, Christ, humankind, worship, and ethics. Most closely studied is the process by which Melanchthon arrived at the particular formulations of The Augsburg Confession, though neither he nor Luther left any notes on that process—scholars have relied upon close textual analysis.15 The process of building communities of faith, in other words, began with writing: confessions that succeeded in forming communities comprised statements that negotiated between differences, finding the word that both sides could accept, the sentence that rang true for both. Indeed, their canonicity might be said to reside in their capacity to be “true” for diverse groups. If they did not ring “true” for many, they could not function to gather dispersed and divergent Christians into a “Church.” In 1555, the Peace of Augsburg legally and formally recognized The Augsburg Confession. It recognized, for the first time in the west, a second statement of faith, alongside that promulgated by Rome. In recognizing The Augsburg Confession, it accorded it a particular legal status: The Augsburg Confession henceforth constituted a statement of truth for those who signed it, of validity equal to the statement of faith endorsed by Rome. In according princes and magistrates the authority to choose The Augsburg Confession as the legally valid statement of faith within their domains, the Peace of Augsburg also accorded The Augsburg Confession a particular kind of normative status. The Augsburg Confession and it alone—not the catechism, not the German Mass, not any other text—would be that which subjects were required
14 For the various editions, see W. H. Neuser, Bibliographie der Confessio Augustana und Apologie 1530–1580 (Nieuwkoop: 1987). 15 For a recent history of the text, see Maurer, Historischer Kommentar; trans. George Anderson, Historical Commentary on the Augsburg Confession (Philadelphia: 1986).
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to confess, sign, publicly affirm; that which would define “the Lutheran Church,” both its doctrine and the boundaries of its membership. In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia legally recognized “the Reformed Church,” but did not accord any of the Reformed Confessions the same normative and definitive status that the Peace of Augsburg—and the Peace of Westphalia—accorded The Augsburg Confession. While specific rulers legally affirmed The Tetrapolitan, Belgic, or Second Helvetic Confessions, and some called for one of those confessions to be exclusive, none could speak for lands beyond his own jurisdiction. The authors of confessions expected others to “sign it,” or “confess” it, state it aloud in public fora, such as churches or courts ecclesiastical and civil. That, at the mechanical level, was how confessions formed groups: those who agreed to those positions became in the 16th century a “Church,” a stable and definable community—by that agreement. When one accepted the tenets of a confession, one became a member of a group which was defined precisely by those tenets— no more, no less. Lutherans, for instance, formulated other texts, but membership in the nascent Lutheran Church was defined by acceptance of The Augsburg Confession. A sense of “signing” shaped how confessions functioned to define communities, both inwardly and externally. By the end of the century, The Augsburg, Belgic, Scots, and Second Helvetic Confessions, and The Thirty-Nine Articles had become documents to which individuals “agreed,” as their sovereigns required—no longer positions simply articulated by theologians and declared “orthodoxy” by ecclesiastical authority, these texts were promulgated, catechized, read aloud, and, in many places, subjects were required to agree formally or publicly to the sentences they contained. Confessions also served as public statements for those who did not sign. They provided the printed and publicized delineation of the boundaries, doctrinal, liturgical, and ethical, of specific “Churches”: the Lutheran Church, the French Reformed Church, the Dutch Reformed Church. In places where members of these churches were in a minority, persecuting authorities need only ask after one tenet of a confession to identify a member of that confession’s Church. Unlike catechisms, which might best be understood to be directed inwardly, toward those who wished to become members of a community, confessions were intended to articulate for members in as precise language as possible the core tenets that defined that community; and to stipulate for others, outside the community, the precise definitions of what that community held to be true.
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By the end of the century, certain confessions of faith had come to define in these ways communities of faith who were translocal and transregional. For authorities, their statements served to identify a person with one group or another. For those who “signed,” each confession constituted a community who shared a public commitment to the truth of each statement in it—no matter if that community was dispersed across a hostile landscape. Confessions did not alone constitute what scholars have come to call “communities of faith,” but they delineated in concise form those positions that both members and opponents came to hold as definitive of that community. They served to “identify,” then, in two ways. For those who signed, they provided the bond from one Christian to the next, the shared text that was itself a public declaration of “faith.” For outsiders, any one sentence of a confession served to identify a person with a group whose legal status varied from place to place. The Content of Confessions In 1555, when the Diet of Augsburg formally accorded The Augsburg Confession legal status, the Catholic Church did not have a comparable statement of faith. It certainly had articulated over its history, in conciliar and papal decrees, specific doctrines it held to be “orthodox,” correct, “dogma,” that which was to be taught. But it did not have anything comparable that it could print and circulate. And The Profession of Faith that the Council of Trent decreed in its third session, in 1546 “as that basic principle on which all who profess the faith of Christ necessarily agree as the firm and sole foundation,” was the same ancient Nicene Creed that evangelicals claimed for themselves.16 In the history of the western Church, European Christians had disagreed on innumerable points of doctrine, but those differences had tended to be singular in any one debate, encompassing perhaps two or three discrete points of doctrine, but not theology, christology, liturgy, ecclesiology, and ethics all at once. Sixteenth-century confessions, moving from the seven points of faith of the Anabaptist confession at Schleitheim to the 40 articles of The French Confession or The Thirty-Nine Articles, gathered together in a single text all those points on which the authors, and then the signatories, held they differed from
16
Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 662.
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other European Christians. No 16th-century confession, from the briefest to the longest, addressed only one or two points of doctrine, and no 16th-century confession diverged from other confessions on only one or two points of doctrine. Their differences were as numerous as the points of doctrine they addressed. Sixteenth-century confessions document both the depth and the multitude of divisions among European Christians. They diverge on essential questions such as Christ’s nature and purpose, human nature and salvation. They testify to the sheer number of divisions: on God’s providence and human free will, good works and Christian brotherly love, Christ’s death and resurrection, worship and its relationship to salvation, the relationship of conduct both to human nature and to salvation, to name but some of the most consistent points of divergence. European Christians did not even agree on what was essential to “true Christianity,” as the differing number of articles of faith in each confession intimates. The Schleitheim Confession comprised seven articles of faith; The Dordrecht Confession of Mennonites of 1632, 18.17 The Augsburg Confession comprised 21 articles of belief and seven articles of dispute; The Tetrapolitan comprised 23 articles, which alternated between positive declarations of faith and express opposition to medieval practice and doctrine. Even among Reformed confessions, there was no consensus as to the number of essential points of doctrine: The First Confession of Basel in 1534 comprised 12 articles of belief; The First Helvetic Confession, of 1536, 27 articles; The Second, 30; The Geneva Confession of 1536, 21 articles of faith; The French Confession of 1559/1571, 40; The Scots Confession of 1560, 25 articles of faith; The Belgic Confession of 1561, 37 articles. In England, the number of articles of faith fluctuated, as different documents sought to encompass divergent Christians: The Thirty-Nine Articles, which sought to speak to Lutherans, was larger than The Thirteen Articles of 1538, The Six Articles of 1543, and The Eleven Articles of 1543, but a reduction of Thomas Cranmer’s The Forty-Two Articles of 1553. The Westminster Confession of 1647 comprised 35 chapters, each subdivided into sections, and concluded with a Declaratory Statement. Over the course of the century, points of dispute proliferated, and even as confessions, such as The French and Second Helvetic, sought
17
988).
Irvin B. Horst (ed. and trans.), Mennonite Confession of Faith (Lancaster, PA:
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to address more points of dispute, they did not all take up the same questions of doctrine. If the content of individual confessions reflects those points that the authors and the signatories held to be definitive of “true Christianity,” we glimpse something of divergent conceptualizations of “Christianity” in the points covered. The Schleitheim Confession comprises only seven points, but those seven points set Anabaptists apart: baptism “. . . to all those who wish such an understanding themselves desire and request it from us”; the use of the ban “with all those who have given themselves over to the Lord . . . and still somehow slip and fall into error”; the eucharist as “the breaking of bread” among the faithful; separation, the choice to live quite apart from “the world”; their pastors, chosen by the congregation; the rejection of “the sword,” as punishment of crimes, as a symbol of civil power, as an instrument of correction; and the refusal to take any oath.18 Other confessions comprised far more points of doctrine, which demarcated with growing precision “communities of faith,” those who held those points essential. After a brief statement on the nature of God, The Augsburg Confession turned to original sin, the divine and human nature of Christ, and justification. Following justification, it declared “To obtain such faith God instituted the office of preaching, giving the gospel and the sacraments,” “[t]hrough these, as through means, He gives the Holy Spirit, who works faith, where and when he wills, in those who hear the gospel.” Article six, “the New Obedience,” stated that “such faith should yield good fruit and good works and that a person must do such good works as God commanded for God’s sake” but that those works in and of themselves did not “earn grace before God.” Article seven defined the Church, “the assembly of all believers among whom the gospel is purely preached and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel.” Article eight stated that the sacraments remain efficacious even as “false Christians, hypocrites, and even public sinners remain among the righteous.” Article nine affirmed infant baptism, “necessary for salvation, that the grace of God is offered through baptism.” Article ten affirmed “the true body and blood of Christ are truly present under the form of bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper and are distributed and received
18 Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions, II, 696–703; Beatrice Jenny (ed.), Das Schleitheimer Täuferbekenntnis 1527 (Thayngen: 1951), 9–18.
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there.” Article 11 called for general, not detailed confession. Article 12 offered a sense of repentance not as a single sufficient act, but a way of entering one’s life as a Christian. Article 13 defined sacraments “as signs and testimonies of God’s will toward us in order thereby to awaken and strengthen our faith.” Article 14 restricted preaching, teaching, and the administration of the sacraments to those who had been publicly called. Article 15 dismissed “all rules and traditions made by human beings for the purpose of appeasing God and of earning grace” as “contrary to the gospel.” Article 16 affirmed government as God’s ordering of the world and condemned Anabaptist separation. Article 17 affirmed the last judgment. Article 18 offered Luther’s definition of the human will’s freedom, as well as its limitation; article 19 stated, “the perverted will causes sin.” Article twenty, by far the longest of the articles of faith, set forth in detail the relationship between faith and good works. Article 21 affirmed “the saints are to be remembered so that we may strengthen our faith when we see how they experienced grace,” and rejected calling on the saints for help of any kind. The remaining articles addressed directly points of medieval practice and doctrine that Lutherans rejected: communion in one kind, clerical celibacy, the sacrifice of the mass, detailed confession, fasting and “the distinction among foods,” monastic vows, prince-bishops with their blending of secular and spiritual powers.19 All Reformed Confessions shared certain core principles: the essential sinfulness of humankind; Christ’s unique sacrifice, in reference to both human salvation and worship; a providential God; sanctification as a lifelong process; two sacraments only, infant baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But they differed in important ways.20 The order from one confession to the next differed. The First Helvetic, Geneva, French, Belgic, and Second Helvetic Confessions affirmed the authority of Scripture before entering into specific points of doctrine. The Scots Confession also affirmed the authority of Scripture, but only at Article 19; for John Knox, God, creation, original sin, and revelation were the points of departure for the doctrine that then followed. So, too, they differed on core definitions, such as the eucharist:
19 Quotations from “The Augsburg Confession: German Text,” Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (eds.), The Book of Concord (Minneapolis: 2000), 27–105. 20 On the relationship of The French Confession to Calvin’s Confession, see Pannier.
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16. The Holy Supper The supper of our Lord is a sign by which under bread and wine he represents to us the true spiritual communion which we have in his body and blood. And we acknowledge that according to his ordinance it ought to be distributed in the community of the faithful, in order that all those who wish to have Jesus for their life be partakers of it. The Geneva Confession, 153621 36. We confess that the Lord’s supper, which is the second sacrament, is a witness of the union which we have with Christ, inasmuch as he not only died and rose again for us once, but also feeds and nourishes us truly in his flesh and blood, so that we may be one in him, and that our life may be in common. Although he remains in heaven until he will come to judge all the earth, still we believe that by the secret and incomprehensible power of his Spirit he feeds and strengthens us with the substance of his body and of his blood. We hold that this is done spiritually, not because we put imagination and fancy in the place of fact and truth, but because the greatness of this mystery exceeds the measure of our senses and the laws of nature. In short, because it is heavenly, it can only be apprehended in faith. The French Confession, 1559/157122 Chapter 21. Of the Holy Supper of the Lord [1.] The Supper of the Lord. The supper of the Lord (which is called the Lord’s table, and the eucharist, that is, a thanksgiving) is, therefore, usually called a supper, because it was instituted by Christ at his last supper, and still represents it, and because in it the faithful are spiritually fed and given drink . . . . [2.] A Memorial of God’s Benefits . . . . [3.] The Sign and Thing Signified. And this is visibly represented by this sacrament outwardly through the ministers, and, as it were, presented to our eyes to be seen, which is invisibly wrought by the Holy Spirit inwardly in the soul. . . . [5.] Spiritual eating of the Lord. . . . The Second Helvetic Confession, 156623
Each of the Reformed confessions sought to define the eucharist: what it was, how it worked, what “eating” meant, the relationship between Christ’s body and the faithful. The Scots Confession did not have one article dedicated specifically to the Supper, but instead contained three articles, “21. The Sacraments”; “22. The Right Administration of the
21 22 23
Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions, II, 316. Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions, II, 384–5. Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions, II, 510–4.
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Sacraments”; and “23. To Whom the Sacraments Appertain.” It was concerned foremost to ensure that properly trained ministers administered the sacraments of baptism and the Supper, and that those who received the sacrament of the Supper were themselves properly prepared. Both The Scots and Second Helvetic Confessions addressed explicitly those who should not be permitted to partake, reflecting a growing concern that, in the words of The Second Helvetic Confession, “Unbelievers Take the Sacrament to Their Judgment.” The Thirty-Nine Articles reflects both its process of formulation and the increasingly ecclectic Christian population of England, which was home, albeit often uncomfortable and unwelcoming, to all the different groups on the continent—Anabaptists, French, and Dutch Reformed, Lutherans, and Catholics—and the soil for a number of churches indigenous to England, such as the one Cranmer had shaped.24 The Thirty-Nine Articles, which became a definitive text, was eclectic, not so much a sequence emanating from a handful of core principles— as say, The Augsburg, Geneva, or Scots Confessions presented—as an aggregate of points of dispute. Some of The Thirty-Nine Articles corresponded to most evangelical confessions: brief articulations of the trinity and Christ’s nature; stipulation of the canon of Scripture, and of the relationship of the Old Testament to the New; recognition of the scriptural validation of the three creeds, Nicene, Athanasius’s, and Apostles’ Creeds; affirmation of essential human sinfulness; the recognition of just two sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper; the affirmation of the singularity of Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross. Some echoed more closely Reformed doctrines: original sin “doth remain, yea, in them that are regenerated”; “Christ in the truth of our nature was made like unto us in all things, sin only except, from which he was clearly void, both in his flesh and in his spirit”; predestination and election; sacraments: “certain sure witnesses and effectual signs of grace and God’s good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm, our faith in him”; the Lord’s Supper, in which “the body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten . . . only after an heavenly and spiritual manner”; the “wicked” did not eat Christ’s body; the excommunicate are to be shunned by all faithful. It rejected the Anabaptist doctrine of community of goods and repudiated both “vain and rash swearing,”
24
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: 1996).
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and the Anabaptist prohibition against all oaths, affirming “a man may swear when the magistrate requireth in a cause of faith and charity, so it be done according to the prophet’s teaching in justice, judgment, and truth.” Some of The Thirty-Nine Articles were addressed to disputes more specific to England: “As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed that he went down into hell”; the Holy Ghost, “proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty and glory with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God”; “the Second Book of Homilies . . . doth contain a godly and wholesome doctrine and necessary for these times.” Some of The ThirtyNine Articles broke entirely with all continental confessions, none of which placed civil authority over their churches. It forbid convening councils “without the commandment and will of princes” (article 21); restricted who might preach or minister the sacraments to those “lawfully called” (article 23); affirmed the Book of Consecration of Archbishops and Bishops that Parliament had authorized under Edward VI, and the King’s/Queen’s majesty in the realm.25 In session 3 of the Council of Trent, the Council affirmed The Nicene Creed as the “sole foundation”—it offered no other confession nor called for any other to be formulated. The canons and decrees of the Council of Trent were not intended to be encompassed in any confession, but to set forth, usually in direct response to evangelical challenge, positions essential to “Catholicism.” Over 18 years, sessions sought to address those challenges through two different procedures: the articulation of doctrine through decrees and canons; and the formal call for reform, also through decrees and canons, of what the Church recognized as abuses, errors, deviations. In session 4, the Council stipulated the canon of the Old and New Testaments, and declared the Vulgate, Jerome’s Latin translation, “the authentic text in public readings.” It decreed what would henceforth the Church’s doctrines on original sin (session 5), justification (6), purgatory (25). In session 7, 1547, the Council set forth 13 canons on sacraments in general— seven in number, instituted by Christ; 14 canons on baptism, with water, allowed for children; three canons on confirmation. In 1551, the Council resumed with a decree on the sacrament of the eucharist, affirming the real presence, the doctrine of transubstantiation, reservation of the sacrament and taking it to the sick, and promulgating 11
25
Pelikan and Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions, II, 526–39.
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canons. In the following session, 14, the Council decreed the doctrine on penance and last annointing, both sacraments—the components of penance (contrition, confession, absolution, and satisfaction)—and promulgated 15 canons on penance, four on last annointing. In session 22, 1562, the Council decreed the doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass, one of its lengthiest doctrines, and a lengthy enumeration of abuses and errors to be avoided. In session 23, the Council affirmed that ordination is a sacrament, articulating four chapters of doctrine and eight canons of law. In session 24, the Council stated the doctrine of the sacrament of marriage. In session 25, 1563, the Council affirmed the cult of saints and the place of images in worship.26 The specific ordering of any one confession may reflect the exigencies of its formulation: the sequence of a synod’s or the Council’s deliberations, a single author’s conceptualization of the interdependencies of specific points of doctrine, points of harmony, points of divergence. The lack of a single sequence, however, points toward the absence of a template, a single text that might serve as a model. There was no single statement of comparable comprehensiveness prior to the 16th century. The Nicene Creed, which many invoked, did not address the full range of issues at play in the 16th century. Formulated in response to christological divisions, it explicated both the relationship between God and Christ and the nature of Christ’s birth and person. Conciliar and papal decrees, formulated in response to specific issues, were neither intended nor sought to be comprehensive in that way—to encompass all that their formulators held to be essential to “true Christianity.” Christianity was lived and practiced prior to the 16th century, but no one had sought—or been faced with the need—to define what Christianity encompassed, its doctrine, its practices, its ethics. Reformation confessions sought to do just that. What they understood to define “true Christianity” might be as few as seven points, but usually comprised far more: the authority of Scripture and the content of the canon of Scripture; definitions of God’s, Christ’s and human natures, of sin, and of “the Church”; delineations of the relationship among Christ, human nature, and salvation; definitions of what a sacrament is, as well as the determination how many sacraments; infant
26
Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II, 657–799.
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or adult baptism; the relationship between Christ’s person and the elements of bread and wine in the eucharist. On each of these points, any two confessions could differ. It was not, in other words, that Lutherans and Catholics divided solely on the question of justification—though The Augsburg Confession did comprise an article of faith on justification. European Christians divided on dozens of discrete points of doctrine and practice, theology and ethics. Each confession, as it “professed,” set forth points which other Christians then repudiated in their own confessions. The Schleitheim Confession engendered repudiations in The Augsburg Confession, which in turn itself engendered both repudiations at the Council of Trent and differentiations in other evangelical confessions. Confessions distinguished from each other groups who shared neither core theological definitions, nor understandings of human nature, nor conceptualizations of worship—what “worship” encompassed, what the relationship between human action and salvation was, what the relationship between “faith” and worship was, what the cognitive function of the rituals of worship was. Confessions grounded far more than divergent theologies. They grounded different ways of imagining the relationship between God and humankind, of entering the world, of defining what it meant to be Christian, and of conceptualizing what it meant to be human. A Dialectic of Definition For 16th-century Christians, confessions, as texts, mattered very much. As those who gathered to forge them recognized—Michael Sattler at Schleitheim, Melanchthon and Luther at Augsburg, French Reformed at La Rochelle, Bullinger in Zurich—the precise points covered in a confession defined “the true Church.” For Christians across Europe, those texts, their contents, determined membership: those who agreed tacitly or publicly to the aggregate of statements a confession contained, no matter where they lived. For minority Churches—the French and Dutch Reformed, Mennonite, Anabaptist, Lutheran in some places— confessions defined a community scattered, whose members were not face-to-face, but bound together, frequently in the face of persecution, by those very sentences. Since the Reformation, over time, a handful of confessions have come to exist in a singular relationship with living communities of Christians: The Schleitheim Confession, The Augsburg Confession,
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The Belgic Confession, The Second Helvetic Confession, The Dordrecht Mennonite Confession of 1632, and The Westminster Confession. These confessions ground an ongoing dialectic of definition both theological and historical. The Thirty-Nine Articles exists in different relationships to the modern Anglican Church, but it remains a “core document,” a text that articulates tenets, principles, that the living community of Christians continues to hold as abidingly true.27 The Tridentine Profession of Faith was the affirmation of an ancient Creed as normative; the Tridentine canons and decrees functioned analogously to that handful of confessions until the Second Vatican Council revisited them, and even now, some Catholics still hold the Tridentine decrees as definitive. These Confessions continue to define “Churches” to this day—long after the conditions and context of their formulation. They do so along two lines. The first is theological. Theologians continue to interrogate their Church’s Confession or the Tridentine decrees for guidance on questions that arise in contemporary life, at once affirming the durability of that Reformation text’s truths and bringing it into the immediacy of living Christianity.28 In this way, these texts continue to serve as a touchstones for orthodoxy among living communities. The second dialectic of definition is historical. At one level, the continued publication of Reformation Confessions in modern translations testifies to their position as “foundational” texts, those texts to which modern Churches look for their “origins.”29 At another, generation after generation of children receive education in these texts, linking their sense of identification with a living Church to Reformation documents, which in turn inform the living community and its sense of itself. Not only The Book of Concord, which contains it, but the Augsburg Confession itself, as well as the Westminster Confession are the
27
See E. Harold Browne, An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles Historical and Doctrinal (London: 1858). 28 See, for example, Jenny, Das Schleitheimer Täuferbekenntnis, Part B; Ernst Koch, Die Theologie der Confessio Helvetica Posterior (Neukirchen: 1968); Bernhard Lohse and Otto Hermann Pesch (eds.), Das Augsburger Bekenntnis von 1530: Damals und Heute (Mainz: 1980), Part III; Joachim Staedtke, (ed.), Glauben und Bekennen: Vierhundert Jahre Confessio Helvetica Posterior (Zurich: 1966); Vilmos Vajta and Hans Weissgerber, The Church and the Confessions: The Role of the Confessions in the Life and Doctrine of the Lutheran Churches (Philadelphia: 1963). 29 The articles collected in Ligon Duncan (ed.), The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century, 4 vols. (Fearn, Tain, UK: 2003) argue for both the homogeneity of the Reformed tradition and its continuity in time.
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subject of study guides written for Sunday school as well as seminaries.30 At yet another level, each Church identifies certain texts as constitutive of its textual “tradition,” others as perhaps “influential”—as, for instance, Zwingli’s Sixty-Seven Articles—but not normative. Modern anthologies contribute to that articulation of “tradition,” as they delineate textual lineages of influence. In the selecting of some texts and not others—for publication, for anthologizing, for translation—Churches continue a dialectic of definition: which texts properly belong to the history of that Church, which not. Collections, typically, do not incorporate laws or other “secular” documents, or, for that matter, texts construed as more “transient” or contingent, such as satires or sermons, when they gather texts for Sunday school or seminaries—but they contain that Church’s Confession. In the twinned dialectics of historical “origins” and the grounding of theological orthodoxy, those Confessions anchor “traditions.”31 Their unique voice and content—neither polemical nor proselytizing, comprehensive—set them apart in that early modern sea of words. Voice and content continue to invite their readers to view these texts as something neither contingent nor contextual, but as a printed thing to which living Christians can look again and again to determine, in the day-to-day, how one lives, what one believes, what one does, if one is a member of the Church that the Confession defined. A handful of Confessions abide, themselves the proof text for the validity, the truthfulness, the orthodoxy not simply of other texts, but of the living of Christianity in the life of each person of faith.
30 See, for example, Robert Shaw, The Reformed Faith: Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith (Christian Heritage, 2008); Gunther Wenz, Theologie der Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche: Eine historische und systematische Einführung in das Konkordienbuch (Berlin: 1996), Part III; G. I. Williamson, Westminster Confession of Faith: For Study Classes (Philipsburg, NJ: 2003). 31 See, for example, Timothy George and Denise George (eds.), Baptist Confessions, Covenants, and Catechisms (Nashville: 1996); Karl Koop, Anabaptist-Mennonite Confessions of Faith: The Development of a Tradition (Kitchener: 2004); Vajta and Weissgerber, eds. The Church and the Confessions.
PART TWO
THE NETHERLANDS
CONFESSIONAL COEXISTENCE IN THE EARLY MODERN LOW COUNTRIES Jesse Spohnholz Something of a paradigm shift is taking place in early modern European history. Historians studying the post-Reformation world once spent far more of their time tracing the construction of new confessional states. In contrast, Dutch historians have been quick to point out that, for people living in the Republic, this narrative did not match reality. Though the Reformed Church did become the official church of the new government, membership was not compelled, and Calvinists remained a minority though the early modern era.1 Instead, the Republic was characterized by a remarkable degree of religious diversity. As a consequence, historians studying these lands have paid considerable attention to understanding the exceptional nature of pluralism. One consequence of this focus, however, is that it reinforced the idea that the Dutch were “tolerant” as an inherent character trait.2 Recently though, historians who study other locations in Europe have come to recognize that, because religious homogeneity remained an elusive goal in most places, scholars need to devote greater attention to understanding how coexistence functioned.3 Further, if pluralism constituted a reality for residents of the Republic, it was no more their goal than it was that of Europeans elsewhere. It was, rather, the result of the complicated interaction of social, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic forces that put people into often unappealing situations. 1 J. J. Woltjer, “De plaats van de calvinisten in the Nederlandse samenleving,” De zeventiende eeuw 10 (1994): 3–23; Olaf Mörke, “Konfessionalisierung als politischsoziales Strukturprinzip? Das Verhältnis von Religion und Staatsbildung in der Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande im 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 16 (1990): 31–60. 2 Benjamin J. Kaplan, “ ‘Dutch’ religious tolerance: celebration and revision” in R. Po-Chia Hsia and Henk van Nierop (eds.), Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, UK: 2002), 8–26. 3 E.g. Alexandra Walsham, Charitable hatred: Tolerance and intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: 2006); Keith Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France (Washington, DC: 2005); Jesse Spohnholz, The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (Newark, DE: 2011).
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Some scholars have even urged that we abandon the term ‘toleration’ altogether, because it presents too rosy of a picture, and instead adopt the more neutral ‘coexistence’ to describe a condition of pluralism that emerged not by design, but as the result of relationships, structures, and actions that were rooted in their immediate contexts.4 In sum, the reality of Dutch religious diversity is beginning to look much more like conditions in cities and towns across early modern Europe.5 In this light, this overview has three aims. The first is to provide an introduction to the landscape of confessional coexistence in the Low Countries. The second is to look beyond the boundaries of the Republic, to present a picture that is less nationalistically-oriented than scholarship often admits. The third is to present one interpretative framework— the language of boundaries—that may be fruitful in understanding religious pluralism in the Low Countries and elsewhere. *
*
*
Across the early modern Low Countries there were, generally speaking, three kinds of confessional arrangements that emerged, largely as a result of the war between the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands. Between 1572, when the rebels first secured territory in Holland and Zeeland, and the Treaty of Münster in 1648, the political boundaries between an officially Catholic state and an officially Reformed state were largely determined on the battlefield. In those places where the Habsburgs gained the upper hand, strong state support of the Catholic Church pushed religious dissenters largely underground. In places where the Dutch Republic solidified its authority, the Reformed controlled the official church, though dissenters retained a much stronger presence than they did in the Spanish-controlled south. Finally, in those lands where the States General of the Republic managed only weak, contested, or partial authority, Catholics, at least, secured limited freedoms to worship alongside members of the
4 Willem Frijhoff, Embodied belief: Ten essays on religious culture in Dutch history (Hilversum: 2002), 48. Marijke Goswijt-Hofstra prefers verdraagzaamheid, which connotes that the condition was grudging. “Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid: Proeven uit vijf eeuwen Nederlands verleden” in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra (ed.), Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid: Afwijking en tolerantie in Nederland van de zestiende eeuw tot heden (Hilversum: 1989), 9–40. 5 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2007).
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Dutch Reformed Church. Within these three general patterns political structures, demographics, geography, connections to powerful domestic and foreign powers, personalities of officials, and economic profiles could be so dramatically different that, as we shall see, there was tremendous variation at the local level.6 Across most of the Republic, the Reformed Church benefited from state sponsorship, while dissenting churches were outlawed. Despite this support, four factors contributed to a situation in which Calvinism remained a minority church and, consequently, multiconfessionalism generally prevailed. First, membership in the official church was voluntary, and there were relatively high demands put on those who wanted to join. Second, individuals were afforded freedom of conscience, even if they were not granted freedom of worship.7 Third, local magistrates adopted a pattern of strategies whose aim was to preserve social order and their own political authority, often by emphasizing common civic or Christian values instead of promoting confessionalization.8 Finally, religious dissenters themselves adopted a variety of strategies that aimed to reduce the threats their presence posed to their neighbors.9 Within this framework, and in large part as a result of its informal nature, there was great variation at the local level. In those places where the rebels quickly consolidated their authority, the Reformed
6 On political structures, see Maarten Prak, “The politics of intolerance: citizenship and religion in the Dutch Republic (17th to 18th centuries)” in Hsia and Nierop (eds.), Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, 159–75; H. Enno van Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid (Groningen: 1972), 20–25. On demographics, see Hans Knippenberg, De religieuze kaart van Nederland: omvang en geografische spreiding van de godsdienstige gezindten vanaf de Reformatie tot heden (Assen: 1992), 9–62. On personalities, particularly of bailiffs, see Xander van Eck, Kunst, twist en devotie: Goudse katholieke schuilkerken, 1572–1795 (Delft: 1994), 123–25; Christine Kooi, “Paying off the sheriff: strategies of Catholic toleration in Golden Age Holland” in Hsia and Nierop (eds.), Calvinism and Religious Toleration, 87–101. 7 On the Union of Utrecht, which leaders of the rebel provinces signed in 1579, and the application of its provision protecting freedom of conscience, see A. Th. van Deursen, “Between Unity and Independence: The application of the Union as a fundamental law,” Low Countries History Yearbook 14 (1981): 50–64. 8 See especially Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie: stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577–1620 (The Hague: 1989). 9 For these strategies as they apply to Mennonites, Catholics, and Lutherans, see: Troy Osborne, “Worthy of the Tolerance They’d been Given: Dutch Mennonites, Reputation, and Political Persuasion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 99 (2008): 256–79; Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, MA: 2008); Joke Spaans, “De lutherse lobby voor vrijheid van godsdienstoefening in Friesland,” De zeventiende eeuw 20, no. 1 (2004): 38–52.
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Church established its supremacy by the early-17th century and membership on the city council often overlapped considerably with that of the consistory. This scenario applies to the strongly Calvinist cities in Zeeland, Groningen, Gelderland, and Overijssel, where magistrates adopted anti-Catholic legislation, and initial impressions suggest that these laws could be strictly enforced.10 Yet, though scholarship once emphasized the success of “Calvinization” in these areas, historians now put greater emphasis on the continued presence of religious minorities.11 Nijmegen experienced serious challenges to Calvinist dominance, including a strong Remonstrant government (until the purges of 1619), energetic Jesuits missionaries, and a garrison that brought German Lutheran soldiers.12 By the late-17th century, Catholics still constituted 10 percent of the population in Kampen, for example, even after a century of harassment, heavy recognition fees, dissimulation, and worshipping in the shadows. Members of the Remonstrant Brotherhood also survived the unusually strong campaign against them in that city, while the profile of local Mennonites even expanded through the 17th century.13 In the city of Groningen, Catholics and Mennonites not only survived well into the 17th century, but even worked as schoolmasters and churchwardens, to the constant frustration of Calvinist ministers.14
10 On the demographic regions that characterized the Republic, see Peter van Rooden, Religieuze regimes: over godsdienst en maatschappij in Nederland 1570–1990 (Amsterdam: 1996) and Knippenberg, Religieuze kaart; Prak, “Politics of Intolerance,” 162–68. 11 For instance, compare Frank van der Pol, De Reformatie te Kampen in de zestiende eeuw (Kampen: 1990) and the same author’s more recent “Religious Diversity and Everyday Ethics in the Seventeenth-Century City Kampen,” Church History 71 (2002): 16–62. For an older narrative of Protestantization, see Pieter Geyl, “De Protestantisering van Noord-Nederland” in his Noord en Zuid: Eenheid en Tweeheid in de Lage Landen (Utrecht: 1960), 150–62; Louis J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het Katholicisme in Noord-Nederland in de 16e en 17e eeuw (Amsterdam: 1947). 12 Hubert Nusteling, Binnen de vesting Nijmegen: confessionele en demografische verhoudingen ten tijde van de Republiek (Zutphen: 1979); Paul Begheyn, De Jezuïeten in Nijmegen (Nijmegen: 1991). 13 G. Hoenderdaal, Staat in de vrijheid: de geschiedenis van de remonstranten (Zutphen: 1982), 62–63; Pol, “Religious Diversity,” 30–36, 41–44. 14 Wiebe Bergsma, “Gereformeerde en doopsgezinden in Groningen,” Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 20 (1994): 129–56. A. Th. van Deursen, Bavianen en Slijkgeuzen: kerk en kerkvolk ten tijde van Maurits en Oldenbarnevelt (Franeker: 1998), 22, 107, 113–14. This stands in contrast to conclusions made by Heinz Schilling, “Reform and Supervision of Family Life in Germany and the Netherlands” in Raymond Mentzer (ed.), Sin and the Calvinists (Kirksville, MO: 1994), 15–62.
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The survival of dissenters was a result of the fact that the campaigns against them were, despite the apparent alliance between magistrates and Calvinist ministers, remarkably uneven in practice. When the frustrated Calvinist ministers in Deventer complained to the States of Overijssel that strict laws against Mennonites were not being followed, the politicians tactfully replied that “they should tolerate the connivance in the private services that have long since happened, but [the Mennonites] should hold [those services] with all quietness.”15 While the Kampen priest Niclaes Peterz was imprisoned, fined heavily, and expelled in 1612 for holding clandestine services, his coworker Theodorus Slachman worked largely undisturbed, though magistrates knew quite well about his activities.16 Perhaps the ministers and elders did not maintain quite as harmonious a relationship with secular authorities in these lands as they presented in the consistory minutes.17 Though more research needs to be done to understand the contours of coexistence in the Calvinist east, what was going on was clearly not a straightforward process of Calvinization. Much more attention to understanding the patterns of confessional coexistence has been given to Holland, Utrecht, and Friesland, which experienced vibrant religious diversity and an unmistakably lax enforcement of laws prohibiting dissent. These places were characterized by the same tension between the official church and religious minorities, though in practice multiconfessionalism became deeply engrained in the realities of daily life. A proliferation of local studies has critically highlighted the great degree of variation, not only in the confessional balance within communities, but also in the strategies that residents developed to manage the conflicts that emerged. Scholars have tended to focus on the late-16th and early-17th centuries, while the late-17th and early-18th centuries have received less attention. 18 Still, it is clear
15
Quoted in Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid, 95. Pol, “Religious Diversity,” 38. 17 As Judith Pollmann has found was the case in Utrecht. Pollmann, “Off the Record: Problems in the Quantification of Calvinist Church Discipline,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 423–38. 18 Joke Spaans, “Stad van vele geloven 1578–1795” in Willem Frijhoff and Maarten Prak (eds.), Geschiedenis van Amsterdam (Amsterdam: 2004), 385–467; Rudolf Evenhuis, Ook dat was Amsterdam: De kerk de hervorming in de gouden eeuw, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: 1971); A. Wouters and P. H. A. M. Abels, Nieuw en ongezien: kerk en samenleving in de classis Delft en Delfland 1572–1621 (Delft: 1994); Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–1620 (Leiden: 2000); H. ten Boom, De Reformatie in Rotterdam, 1530–1585 (Amsterdam: 1987). 16
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that in religiously-mixed communities of the Republic, particularly in the trade cities of Holland, coexistence could be quite intimate. In the area immediately surrounding Het Spui, in Amsterdam, lay the clandestine Catholic churches De Lilie, de Franse kapel, and de Krijtberg, the Lutheran Old Church, the Mennonite church Het Lam, and the Begijnhof, which until 1635 was shared by English Puritans and Catholic Beguines.19 Similarly, in the same city, the Jesuit Henricus van Alckemade, who operated a missionary station on the Kaisergracht, had as many as seven Reformed pastors as neighbors.20 In cities across Holland, Calvinists remained a minority, though local variations were considerable. In Haarlem, the Reformed church made up roughly one-fifth of the population circa 1620. The rest were Mennonites (14 percent), Catholics, (12.5 percent), and Lutherans (1 percent), while the rest—still a majority of residents—did not belong to any church.21 In Rotterdam too, enthusiasm for the Reformed Church remained limited. A strong non-confessional strain there, suggests H. ten Boom, encouraged as much as 15 percent of the population to join the Remonstrant Brotherhood.22 The Catholic population amounted to a mere 5 percent in 1622.23 In contrast, nearby Gouda had a significant Remonstrant church, but also a Catholic population of roughly one-third of the population.24 Just to the northeast, Woerden was home to, proportionally speaking, the largest Lutheran population in the Republic and a strong Remonstrant church, but had virtually no Catholic presence.25 Alkmaar, in Holland’s North Quarter,
Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie; Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford: 1995). 19 Judith Pollmann, “Burying the dead; reliving the past: ritual, resentment and sacred space in the Dutch Republic” in Benjamin J. Kaplan et al. (eds.), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands, c. 1570–1720 (Manchester: 2009), 95. 20 Christine Kooi, “Katholieken en tolerantie in de Gouden Eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor Nederlands Kerkgeschiedenis 2 (1999): 114. 21 Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie, 104. 22 Boom, Reformatie in Rotterdam; Hoenderdaal, Staat in de vrijheid. 23 Jonathan Israel, Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: 1995), 380. 24 Eck, Kunst, twist en devotie; Knippenburg, Religieuze kaart, 39–40. 25 Between 1572 and 1602 Woerden was indeed the only locale in the Republic that legally permitted Lutheran worship. There is no complete study of Woerden, but it has been studied by Willem Frijhoff. See his Fulfilling God’s Mission: The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus, 1607–1647, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Leiden: 2007).
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was nearly half Catholic, and only about 10 percent Reformed, while nearby Enkhuizen had only a small Catholic community, but developed an assertive Calvinist majority.26 Some places, like Dordrecht and Delft, saw greater cooperation between the magistrates and the Calvinist consistory, while other places, like Leiden, saw a deep mistrust that engendered decades of conflicts. Recent studies on Friesland and Utrecht have provided a glimpse of confessional coexistence beyond Holland. Friesland was home to substantial Anabaptist and Catholic populations. In Sneek, Catholics constituted the majority of the population even after 60 years of Calvinist dominance.27 Though both church and state cooperated on a wide range of issues, including issuing laws restricting Mennonite and Catholic worship, we do not see the same unity of purpose when it came to enforcing those laws. As a result of this inaction, Wiebe Bergsma has argued that religious freedoms were rather wide, even if dissenters remained second-class citizens.28 In Utrecht, the former Catholic episcopal seat for most of the northern provinces, Catholics amounted to roughly 30–40 percent of the population in the early17th century. Further, the city had a high population of Lutherans, driven largely by immigration from Germany in the 17th century. 29 Far less work has been done on the countryside. What is known suggests that there were dramatic differences there as well. In many places, Calvinists were slow to establish a strong presence. In Weesp, a village of south Holland, Catholics held all the administrative offices in 1622, ensuring relative freedom for their coreligionists, official bans notwithstanding. As late as 1650, Reformed in the north Holland village of Wijk aan Zee made up only 5 percent of the population.30 In the village of Graft, one of the few rural communities to receive close
26 Willem Frijhoff and Marijke Spies, 1650: hard-won unity, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Assen: 2004), 352; Deursen, Bavianen en Slijkgeuzen, 132–33. 27 Wiebe Bergsma, “Calvinismus in Friesland um 1600 am Beispiel der Stadt Sneek,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 80 (1989): 258. 28 Wiebe Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende en publieke kerk: een studie over het gereformeerd protestantisme in Friesland, 1580–1650 (Leeuwarden: 1999); idem, “ ‘Uyt Christelijcken yver en ter eeren Godes’: Wederdopers en verdraagzaamheid” in Gijswijt-Hofstra (ed.), Een schijn van verdraagzaamheid, 69–84. 29 Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 274–78; Ronald Rommes, Oost, west, Utrecht best?: driehonderd jaar migratie en migranten in de stad Utrecht (begin 16e-begin 19e eeuw) (Amsterdam: 1998). 30 A. Th. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age, trans. Maarten Ultee (Cambridge, UK: 1991), 286, 293.
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study, the Reformed were the majority, but Mennonites maintained not only a substantial presence, but held seats on the city council. In neighboring De Rijp, the balance was reversed and, until 1638, Mennonites dominated among local councilmen.31 In both towns, Catholics were politically and socially marginalized. In contrast, Catholics made up the vast majority in the small isolated villages of the Land of Maas and Waal, in western Gelderland, where they crowded into the castles of local nobles for worship, while parish churches stood largely empty.32 Although systematic research has not been done, the eastern area of Achterhoek in Gelderland remained a confessional patchwork through the 17th century. Even in nearly homogeneously Calvinist Zeeland, Catholics continued to move into the villages of South Beveland.33 Though rural areas have not received nearly the attention that the Republic’s cities have earned, confessional coexistence in these communities of only several hundred inhabitants each surely could have been just as intimate as it was in the cities. The question of coexistence in the Spanish Netherlands has commanded far less attention than it has in the Republic. Rather, historians who have focused on the southern provinces have tended to emphasize the success of the Catholic Reformation in the century after the Habsburgs solidified their authority. In contrast to the work on the Republic, rural studies have dominated.34 In general, these works have emphasized the dreadful state of church life at the start of the
31
In that year, the States of Holland removed them from office; from that point on, membership on the city council overlapped considerably with that of the Calvinist consistory. A. Th. van Deursen, Een dorp in de polder: Graft in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: 1995); Pieter Visser, Dat Rijp is moet eens door eygen Rijpheydt vallen: Doopsgezinden en de gouden eeuw van De Rijp (Wormerveer: 1992), 58–77. 32 Most members of the Reformed church were city or parish officials, whose posts required that they join. H. ten Boom, “De vestiging van de gereformeerde kerk in het land van Maas en Waal,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 50 (1970): 225. 33 Knippenburg, Religieuze kaart, 27; Israel, Dutch Republic, 379, 642. 34 Michel Cloet, Het kerkelijk leven in een landelijke dekenij van Vlaanderen tijdens de XVIIe eeuw: Tielt van 1609 tot 1700 (Leuven: 1968); Kristin Raeymaecker, Het godsdienstig leven in de landdekenij Antwerpen (1610–1650) (Leuven: 1977); Marc Therry, De religieuze beleving bij de leken in het 17de-eeuwse bisdom Brugge (1609–1706) (Brussel: 1988); Leo Braeken, De dekenij Herentals 1603–1669 (Leuven: 1982); T. B. W. Kok, Dekenaat in de steigers kerkelijk opbouwwerk in het Gentse dekenaat Hulst 1596–1648 (Tilburg: 1971). Marie Juliette Marinus’s study of Antwerp offers a notable counterexample. Marie Juliette Marinus, Contrareformatie te Antwerpen (1585–1676): kerkelijk leven in een grootstad (Brussels: 1995). Craig Harline and Eddy Put have also studied the archbishop of Mechelen. Craig Harline and Eddy Put, A Bishop’s Tale: Mathias Hovius among his Flock in Seventeenth-Century Flanders (New Haven: 2000).
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17th century. Many church buildings had been badly damaged or simply destroyed over the course of the war. Of the 22 parishes studied by Michel Cloet in the deanery of Tielt, only five were in a usable state in 1609.35 A massive building campaign began across the war-ravaged parishes in the first half of the 17th century: fences were restored, walls rebuilt, baptismal fonts replaced, confessional stools installed, pews built, and altar lamps replaced. The campaign demanded huge investments from church officials, state coffers, and local notables. The 17th-century campaign to eradicate the religious diversity that had prevailed during the previous century across the southern provinces demanded that state-sponsored Catholic parishes not only rebuilt churches, but also retrained priests. The Mechelen Provincial Council (1607) adopted the objectives of the Council of Trent, and the 17th century saw the gradual implementation of those norms. New seminaries were established to train young priests, who were later joined by assistant pastors, churchwardens, and religious orders.36 By the end of the century the laity gained good access to sermons and catechetical instruction, and the Catholic hierarchy could be much more confident that what they heard accorded to Tridentine norms. Albert and Isabella were critically important in the revitalization of Catholicism, though research on subsequent Governors General remains to be done.37 But these changes were not just a top-down imposition; lay Catholics founded devotional confraternities, celebrated processions, and intensely celebrated both the cult of the Eucharist and of the Virgin Mary. The Catholicism of the Spanish Netherlands also developed an explicitly international character, not only in the sense that it bore a Tridentine stamp, but also because of the deep concern for exporting it to Protestant lands.38
35
Cloet, Kerkelijk leven, 360–65. For Herental, see Braecken, Dekenij Herental, 84–90. For the parishes around Antwerp, see Raeymaecker, Godsdienstig leven, 41–44. 36 Cloet, Kerkelijk leven, 168–75, 245–67; Braeken, Dekenij Herental, 77–128; Marinus, Contrareformatie, 17–38, 72–81, 155–94; Raeymaecker, Godsdienstig leven, 41–50, 90–98. 37 Paul Arblaster, “The Archdukes and the Northern Counter-Reformation” in Werner Thomas and Luc Duerloo (eds.), Albert & Isabella, 1598–1621: catalogus (Leuven: 1998), 87–91; H. J. Elias, Kerk en staat in de zuidelijke Nederlanden onder de regeering der aartshertogen Albrecht en Isabella (1598–1621) (Antwerp: 1931). 38 Paul Arblaster, “The Southern Netherlands Connection: Networks of Support and Patronage” in Kaplan, et al. (eds.), Catholic Communities in Protestant States,
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This narrative of Catholic Reformation, however, has downplayed the continued existence of religious minorities in the Spanish Netherlands. As the work of Guido Marnef, Johan Decavelle, and A. L. E. Verheyden has shown, the southern provinces were home to a variety of dissenting churches in the 16th century.39 The history of religious dissenters after the 1580s, though, mostly remains to be written. This is in large part because there were few of them—a consequence of widespread conversion, emigration, and the successes of the Catholic Reformation mentioned above. Yet Marie Marinus and Michel Cloet find pockets of Calvinists and Mennonites until well into the 17th century. These religious minorities were able to survive principally because of the moderate nature of the campaign against them. The fact that in January 1609 the archdukes lowered the maximum penalty for heresy from death to expulsion reduced the threat for dissenters who decided to stick it out in the Spanish Netherlands. In addition, Guido Marnef has demonstrated that many of these conversions to Catholicism in the 1580s were insincere, coming as they did at the eleventh hour before penalties for refusing to convert would be enforced. This suggests that many men and women may have only conformed outwardly to the state church though some surely secured private avenues for religious dissent.40 The bishop of Antwerp in the 1650s, Gaspar Nemius, had a strong suspicion that this was exactly what was happening. There is evidence that he was right in the Flemish city of Tielt, where local magistrates and deans actively abetted in hiding Protestants from prying episcopal authorities.41 More research on this topic is certainly needed. It is possible that, despite quite distinct historiographical traditions, the difference in religious coexistence in the southern and northern 123–38; Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (New York: 2003). 39 Guido Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis, 1550–1577 (Baltimore: 1996); idem, Het Calvinistisch bewind te Mechelen, 1580–1585 (Kortrijk-Heule: 1987); Johann Decavele, Het eind van een rebelse droom: Opstellen over het Calvinistisch bewind te Gent (1577–1584) (Gent: 1984); A. L. E. Verheyden, Anabaptism in Flanders, 1530–1650 (Scottdale, PA: 1961). 40 Guido Marnef, “Protestant conversions in an age of Catholic Reformation: The case of Antwerp” in Arie-Jan Gelderblom et al. (eds.), The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs (Leiden: 2004), 33–48. On this phenomenon in England, see Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, UK: 1999). 41 Marinus, Contrareformatie te Antwerpen, 238; Cloet, Kerkelijk leven, 443–44, 450–56.
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provinces is more a matter of magnitude than of kind. Certainly when a Dutchman from the Republic visited Antwerp in 1654, he described the situation as one of “quiet connivance” (stille oochluyckinge)—the same term that residents in the north used to describe the uncomfortable pluralism there.42 The third kind of confessional arrangement in the early modern Low Countries prevailed in those lands that fell under the political jurisdiction of the Republic, but provided Catholics limited privileges to worship. These were mostly places that had been captured from the Spanish after the Twelve-Years Truce (1609–1621) and that retained a much stronger Catholic presence. In these areas, political authority functioned much like colonial domination. Unsurprisingly, tensions could result. At the same time, the tenuous political authority of a fledgling state, as well as its officials’ prudent wariness about antagonizing foreign Catholic powers, often forced the Republic to make concessions when faced with Catholic resistance. One example of this can be found in the Generality Lands—those territories that the States General had conquered from the southern provinces and governed directly. States Flanders and States Brabant, which constituted the most populous regions of these lands, included the cities of Tilburg, Bergen op Zoom, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Breda, Eindhoven, Sluis, Terneuzen, and Hulst. With few exceptions, priests and monks in these cities had been expelled and Catholic worship suppressed.43 Curiously, nuns were allowed to retain their religious houses, though little is known about their role in local Catholic communities. Meanwhile, the churches were taken over by Reformed ministers, who were mostly imported from elsewhere in the Republic. Yet, in the rural areas of the Generality Lands, where the States General’s authority was precarious, Catholic observance continued, a concession that in practice allowed urban Catholics to travel to neighboring towns for worship. Until rural Catholicism was also banned after 1648, Catholics in Bergen op Zoom, for instance, attended services in nearby Halsteren, Heerle, and Wouw.44 Even when the States General forbade all Catholic practice in the Generality Lands, after the Treaty of Münster in 1648, its ability to 42
Marinus, Contrareformatie te Antwerpen, 243. Charles de Mooij, Geloof kan Bergen verzetten: Reformatie en katholieke herleving te Bergen op Zoom, 1577–1795 (Hilversum: 1998), 151–81. 44 Mooij, Geloof van Bergen verzetten, 292–300. 43
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enforce this ban remained tenuous. Reformed ministers faced deeply suspicious and openly hostile populations. Catholic crowds sometimes interrupted Reformed services or seized churches.45 In other places, Catholics engaged in open worship in spite of repeated prohibitions against it and often continued to serve as schoolmasters, city officials, and poor relief officers. How well and upon what conditions coexistence in this tense environment worked deserves further research. Charles de Mooij’s study of Bergen op Zoom provides an excellent start, though more research on confessional relations in the Generality Lands and the cautious strategies for managing conflicts under these conditions is needed. Meanwhile, when the States General conquered Maastricht in 1632, it also inherited a peculiar form of government that protected Catholic worship. The city had been ruled jointly by the duke of Brabant and the prince-bishop of Liège since the Middle Ages, a situation called condominium. Largely to avoid agitating the mostly Catholic population, the prince-bishop of Liège, or his Catholic allies elsewhere, the States agreed to a system of biconfessional parity similar to that which had developed in the Holy Roman Empire.46 Calvinists, who made up only 20 percent of the population, were granted two church buildings, while the majority Catholics retained the use of the rest. In addition, the two confessions shared subsidies for poor relief and education equally. In his study of this condition, P. J. H. Ubachs argues that the Reformed were not significantly privileged by this situation, though we still have little sense yet of the relationships between confessional communities in Maastricht, or how Lutherans and Mennonites fared in this condition. To the north and east of Maastricht, in the Overmaas, which consisted of the Lands of Dalhem, ‘s-Hertogenrade, and Valkenburg, another situation obtained altogether. Beginning in 1632, when the 45 E.g. Judith Pollmann, “Burying the dead; reliving the past: ritual, resentment and sacred space in the Dutch Republic” in Kaplan, et al. (eds.), Catholic communities in Protestant states, 84–86. 46 On this system of parity and other forms of biconfessionalism in the Dutch Republic, see Benjamin J. Kaplan’s essay in this volume. On the situation in Maastricht P. J. H. Ubachs, Twee heren, twee confessies: De verhouding van staat en kerk te Maastricht, 1632–1673 (Assen: 1975). On biconfessionalism and parity in the Holy Roman Empire, see David M. Luebke’s essay in this volume. Also, Paul Warmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen in einer Stadt: Das Zusammenleben von Katholiken und Protestanten in den paritätischen Reichstädten Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg und Dinkelsbühl von 1548 bis 1648 (Wiesbaden: 1983).
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States captured these lands, a system of simultaneum emerged, in which Catholics and Reformed shared church buildings. The practice was used across the border in the county of Berg and elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire. Research on the German examples has demonstrated that negotiations about how to share the church buildings could be quite complicated and that the close proximity simultaneum required could sometimes breed local conflicts.47 W. A. J. Munier’s study of simultaneum in the Overmaas lands suggests that the same was true there.48 The towns of Overmaas were divided largely between a small Reformed population and a larger Catholic population; there were few Mennonites or Lutherans, to say nothing of smaller churches.49 In the 18th century, after the Republic captured the neighboring area of Upper Gelderland, the government adopted a less formal biconfessional arrangement based on a model that it had briefly instituted there during the Eighty Years’ War.50 Some scholars have suggested that the confessional arrangements described in this overview thus far, which were mostly hammered out in the late-16th and early-17th centuries, finally stabilized by the mid17th century. Indeed, the Treaty of Münster established an agreedupon political boundary between the competing states. In the Hapsburg lands, religious minorities mostly departed or converted after decades of state-supported harassment. Some historians of the Republic have 47 E.g. Warmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen in einer Stadt; Stefan Ehrenpreis, ‘Wir sind mit blutigen Köpfen davongelaufen’: Lokale Konfessionskonflikte im Herzogtum Berg 1550–1700 (Bochum: 1993), 114–24, 153–54; Emily Fisher Gray, “Good Neighbors: Architecture and Confession in Augsburg’s Lutheran Church of Holy Cross, 1525– 1661,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2004). 48 Wilhelmus Munier, Het Simultaneum in de landen van Overmaas: Een uniek instituut in de nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis (1632–1878) (Leeuwarden: 1998). For the complicated diplomatic negotiations between Spain and the Dutch Republic over conflicting claims of sovereignty in these lands, see J. A. K. Haas, De verdeling van de landen van Overmaas, 1644–1662: Territoriale disintegratie van een betwist grensgebied (Assen: 1978). 49 An exception is the town of Vaals, which lay just across the German border from the imperial city of Aachen. From 1649, the small Reformed population originally shared city churches with Catholics in a simultaneum arrangement. Governmental support gave increasing visibility to that church into the 18th century. A Lutheran church was established relatively late, in 1737. Meanwhile, a small Mennonite church also existed in the 18th century, though very few records reveal even its existence. In any case, many, perhaps even most, non-Catholics who worshiped in Vaals actually lived in or around Aachen. W. A. J. Munier, “Kerken en kerkgangers in Vaals van de Staatse tijd tot op heden,” Publications de la société historique et archéologique dans le Limbourg 136–37 (2000–01): 85–262, especially 151–53, 190. 50 On this, see Benjamin J. Kaplan’s essay in this volume.
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described the gradual alignment of the once large non-confessional, undecided, or un-churched population with one of the confessional churches.51 Some have suggested that, by the mid-17th century, the Republic was marked by a clearer solidification of confessional boundaries, even going so far as to describe that society as ‘arranged in columns’ (verzuild), that is, separated into confessional camps of people who lived next to each other, but rarely interacted.52 In the earlier scenario, people ensured coexistence because the lines between confessions were remarkably blurry. In the later arrangement, they managed to achieve coexistence because the lines were extremely rigid. There is reason to think that this chronological shift was not so straightforward. First, Wiebe Bergsma has shown that a full quarter of the population in Friesland in 1660 still belonged to no church.53 Second, active critics of confessionalism never disappeared, like Balthasar Bekker, who used the increasingly popular Cartesianism to criticize dogma and church structure.54 It does seem, however, that by the end of the 17th century more people were aligning themselves with a particular church. This trend may not have been because they were beginning to adopt confessional attitudes though. Joke Spaans has suggested, rather, that it may have been the result of a policy shift taken by governmental officials to stop offering poor relief to everyone and demand instead that each congregation take responsibility for it is own poor. This encouraged individuals to align themselves with a particular church. The default affiliation was Reformed, meaning that many people now counted as Reformed, though we have no evidence to indicate that they changed their religious views.55
51 On these groups, see: Deursen, Bavianen en Slijkgeuzen, 128–34; Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 68–110; Wiebe Bergsma, “Calvinisten en libertijnen: Enkele opmerkingen n.a.v. Benjamin Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines,” Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 22 (1996): 209–27. 52 J. de Kok, Nederland op de breuklijn Rome-Reformatie (Assen: 1964); Simon Groenveld, Huisgenoten des geloofs: was de samenleving in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden verzuild? (Hilversum: 1995). 53 Bergsma, Tussen Gideonsbende, 96–150. Gabrielle Dorren’s study of Haarlem suggests similarly that people’s attitudes toward confessions remained quite fluid through the late 17th century. Dorren, Eenheid en verscheidenheid: de burgers van Haarlem in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam: 2001), 131–68. 54 Andrew Fix, Fallen Angels: Balthasar Bekker, Spirit Belief, and Confessionalism in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Boston: 1999). 55 Joke Spaans, Armenzorg in Friesland 1500–1800 (Hilversum: 1997). This pattern is corroborated by Mooij, Geloof kan Bergen verzetten, 614–24.
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It may be that imagining a dichotomy between non-confessional and confessional mindsets still presents too simple of a picture. At the level of an individual, Judith Pollmann’s study of Arnoldus Buchelius suggests people could accommodate two different understandings of Christianity—one that was confessional and one that was supraconfessional—at the same time and that their ability to do so might help explain coexistence.56 At the level of a city, Gabrielle Dorren’s study of Haarlem offers a similar perspective.57 Social institutions that were confessionally-mixed provided individuals of conflicting faiths with social space for collaboration, even in times of confessional tensions. Recent attention to neighborhood associations ( gebuurten), organizations that were responsible for public safely but were also critical in funeral celebrations and public festivities, suggests a deep degree of interaction between people of competing faiths.58 Similar attention might well be given to militias, guilds, chambers of rhetoric, fraternities, schools, universities, and orphanages, all of which had memberships or staffs that were multiconfessional. If historians are to understand better confessional coexistence in the early and late Republic, they will have to pay considerable attention to tracing those avenues of life in which people segregated themselves according to confession and those avenues of life in which they found common cause around a shared civic, Christian, or national value system. *
*
*
At this point, it is clear that historians can clearly no longer explain toleration as an inherently “Dutch” attribute. In fact, even in the most religiously diverse communities, most early modern Netherlanders never accepted toleration as a positive moral value. Rather, they saw 56 Judith Pollmann, Religious Choice in the Dutch Republic: The Reformation of Arnoldus Buchelius, 1565–1641 (Manchester: 1999). 57 Dooren, Eeenheid en verscheidenheid. For nearby Wesel, see Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration. 58 Llewellyn Bogaerts, “Geleund over de onderdeur: Doorkijkjes in het Utrechtse buurtleven van de vroege middeleeuwen tot in de zeventiende eeuw,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 112 (1997): 336–63; Hermann Roodenburg, “ ‘Freundschaft’, ‘Brüderlichkeit’, und ‘Einigkeit’: Städtische Nachbarschaften im Westen der Republik” in T. Dekker, et al. (eds.), Ausbreitung bürgerlicher Kultur in den Niederlanden und Nordwestdeutschland (Münster: 1991), 10–24; Carl A. Hoffmann, “Social Control and the Neighborhood in European Cities” in Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (eds.), Social Control in Europe, vol. 1 (Columbus, OH: 2004), 309–27.
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religious unity as a critical prerequisite for both social stability and political order. The grim truth that this ideal never matched lived reality presented them with a grave problem. In order to understand how people coped, it is useful to investigate the ways that early modern Netherlanders imagined and constructed boundaries that could help them manage the reality of confessional difference. Critical in this effort was securing boundaries that defined both political jurisdictions and public spaces, only outside of which deviations from religious unity would be tolerable.59 Just as important was the fact that people could cross those boundaries and challenge them in ways that secured unthreatening but substantive avenues for religious dissent. The most critical political boundary in the Low Countries was that between the nascent Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands. But people crossed that boundary all the time. First, a steady stream of Catholic pastors and missionaries headed northward to aid coreligionists. Franciscans and Jesuits from the southern provinces regularly crossed the border to serve Dutch Catholics.60 Secular priests who served in the Generality Lands were usually trained at the University of Leuven and supervised by ecclesiastical officials in the south. The bishops of Antwerp, for instance, retained ecclesiastical authority over Catholics living in lands of the marquisate of Bergen op Zoom; the bishops even periodically made visitations of missionary stations in the Republic.61 This was true for the bishoprics of ‘s-Hertogenbosch and Roermond as well, and all three of these were supervised by the archbishop of Mechelen. Secular priests serving the Holland Mission, which supervised Catholics across the rest of the Republic, usually hailed from northern families, but also often studied at Leuven.62 In each case, priests carried the message of the global Catholic mission to residents of the Republic by offering sermons, sacraments, and pastoral care. Catholic women also crossed northward across the border, though in smaller numbers. Marc Wingens tells the story of Maria Margaretha van Valkenisse, the Discalced Carmelite from Antwerp,
59 For boundaries understood as imagined and historically constructed geographical definitions, see Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: 1989). 60 J. Andriessen, De Jezuieten en het samenhorigheidsbesef (Antwerp: 1957). 61 Mooij, Geloof kan Bergen verzetten, 467–71. 62 Gian Ackermans, Herders en huurlingen: bisschoppen en priesters in de Republiek (1663–1705) (Amsterdam: 2003), 67–120. On the Holland Mission, see Parker, Faith on the Margins.
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who in 1644 founded a new convent in Oirschot, in States Brabant. The streams of pilgrims visiting the convent after her death suggest that the impact of Valkenisse’s nuns went far beyond their numbers.63 Lay people also sustained Catholics in the Republic by crossing the border. Catholic printing presses in the Spanish Netherlands produced books for export northward. Southern artists were commissioned to produce paintings, altars, and other ornamentation for the elaborate Catholic secret churches in the Republic.64 Northern parents who wanted to ensure that their children received a Catholic education sent them to study in Jesuit schools in towns held by the Spanish.65 Pious Catholics also travelled south across the border to pilgrimage sites such as the Marian shrines at Berendrecht and Scherpenheuvel.66 Chapels and churches on the borders were built with the financial support of southern bishops and secular princes, such as the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. If Dutch Catholics had a dramatic revival after 1650, as Charles H. Parker and others have argued, then it was in part because the political borders were so permeable, and because Catholics took advantage of this fact. It was not only Catholics who made use of these porous boundaries. Thousands of Protestants crossed the border permanently, establishing new homes for themselves in the Dutch Republic.67 At the same time, hundreds of underground Calvinists, Lutherans, and Anabaptists in the Spanish Netherlands made the short trip to the nearby Dutch border towns of Lillo, Bergen op Zoom, Ossendrecht, and Aardenburg for
63 Marc Wingens, “A ‘Holy Nun’ in a Protestant Country: Maria Margaretha van Valckenisse (1605–1658)” in Jürgen Beyer et al. (eds.), Confessional Sanctity (c. 1500– c. 1800) (Mainz: 2003), 291–302. 64 Arblaster, “The Southern Netherlands,” 123–238; Xander van Eck, Clandestine Splendor: Paintings for the Catholic Church in the Dutch Republic (Zwolle: 2008). 65 Begheyn, Jezuïeten in Nijmegen, 21; Marc Wingens, Over de grens: de bedevaart van katholieke Nederlanders in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Nijmegen: 1994), 173. 66 Mooij, Geloof kan Bergen verzetten, 561–68; Winghens, Over de grens; L. Duerloo and Marc Winghens, Scherpenheuvel: het Jeruzalem van de Lage Landen (Leuven: 2002). 67 J. Briels, Zuid-Nederlandse immigratie 1572–1630 (Haarlem: 1978). For the debate on their impact see A. A. van Schelven, Omvang en invloed der zuid-nederlandsche immigratie van het laatste kwaart der 16e eeuw (The Hague: 1919) and Louis J. Rogier, “Over karakter en omvang van de nederlandse emigratie in de zestiende eeuw,” Historisch Tijdschrift 17 (1938): 5–27.
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worship.68 The Arminian ministers expelled from the Dutch Reformed Church at the Synod of Dort in 1619 crossed southward to ensure their survival. Happy to frustrate the Republic, Albert and Isabella gave safe haven to these refugees. Forty expelled ministers held a synod that year in Antwerp, at which they drew up a framework for the new Remonstrant Brotherhood. Remonstrant leaders quickly amassed considerable finances and started establishing underground churches in the Republic.69 Between the Republic and the Holy Roman Empire lay another set of political boundaries whose very existence both defined and challenged political and religious authority. The cities of Emden and Wesel, located in the county of East Friesland and the duchy of Cleves respectively, played key roles in protecting and securing Calvinists and Mennonites during the 16th century. These cities provided refugees with a space to organize resistance to Catholic rule, publish devotional literature that was banned back home, and worship in relative peace.70 In the 17th century, this dynamic was reversed: German exile centers now took on important roles for Dutch Catholics. Though no substantive study has yet been done on Cologne’s role for Dutch Catholics, Geert Janssen is currently working to fill this void. What we already know, though, is telling. The bishop of Roermond fled there in 1578, as did the apostolic vicar of the Holland Mission, Sasbout Vosmeer, in 1604 and the dean of the Haarlem chapter in 1605. Cologne’s St. Barbara monastery became a meeting place for Dutch exiles. Vosmeer founded a seminary for future Dutch priests in Cologne.71 Cologne’s printers produced propaganda and devotional material for clandestine import into the Republic. Cologne, it seems, served much the same function for Dutch Catholics of the 17th century that Emden and Wesel had once served for Dutch Calvinists and Mennonites. The duchy of Cleves also took on central importance for Dutch Catholics. In the late-17th century, under the patronage of the local Oratorian order, the chapel devoted to Our Lady of Kevelaer became
68 Marinus Contrareformatie te Antwerpen, 62, 237–38; Elias, Kerk en staat, 16; Cloet, Kerkelijk leven, 453, 457–61; Raeymaecker, Godsdienstig leven, 172–84. 69 Hoenderdaal, Staat in vrijheid, 9–55. Catholic Church officials were more wary then the archdukes about the Remonstrants’ presence. Marinus, Countrareformatie te Antwerpen, 65–66; Elias, Kerk en staat, 28–30. 70 Andrew Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford: 1992); Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration. 71 Parker, Faith on the Margins, 28–29.
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the most popular pilgrimage site in the region. Marc Wingens has recreated the travel routes that men and women took from all across the Republic.72 On the way, they visited less prominent pilgrimage sites, including the Marian statue at Oostrum in Gelderland and Our Lady of Handel in the independent enclave of Gemert. People traveled in groups, such that the journey itself became a sacred procession, the climax of which was crossing the border into Cleves, at which point, people took out their cross, banners, and staffs crowned with silver engravings of Our Lady of Kevelaer. In the 18th century such trips were orchestrated by Catholic brotherhoods whose primary purpose was these annual processions. Such brotherhoods were established in Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, Amersfoort, and elsewhere, including major cities in the Generality Lands. The imaginary boundaries that defined the political jurisdictions in the Low Countries did not simply run east and west, north and south. One of the most remarkable features of political authority in the early modern era was the survival of any number of feudal enclaves within the territorial borders of the emergent state. In the Dutch Republic, these feudal enclaves played an important role in the system of religious pluralism that developed. Historians often associate the rise of religious toleration with the emergence of modern states, though there is good reason to think this perspective needs to be refined. After all, advocates of strong secular states could support religious policies that were deeply intolerant, as Richard Tuck has shown for instance with the jurist Justus Lipsius.73 Conversely, feudal enclaves within the Republic—historical relics of a political order whose relevance was fading—served as a critical bulwark for religious minorities by offering them a legally defensible opportunity for worship within confessional states. Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra has emphasized the role of these free
72 Wingen, Over de grens, especially 249–54. Though the duchy was ruled by the Reformed Elector of Brandenburg from 1612, a compromise reached with his neighboring Catholic political rival allowed Catholic worship in many Cleves towns. Dorothea Coenen, Die Katholische Kirche am Niederrhein von der Reformation bis zum Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts (Münster: 1967), 77–90. 73 Richard Tuck, “Scepticism and toleration in the seventeenth century” in Susan Mendus (ed.), Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, UK: 1988), 21–36. On the relationship between Lipsius and state building, see Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, UK: 1982).
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seignories as asylums for people fleeing the law for secular reasons.74 These enclaves offer potential as a source for understanding the survival of religious dissenters as well. During the Reformation, they played a role in protecting Calvinist and Lutheran minorities.75 They played a much more important role for Catholics in the Republic, who travelled to autonomous enclaves to baptize their children, to celebrate the Mass, to attend school, and to worship at local pilgrimage shrines that popped up within their borders. In addition, religious houses that had been expelled from the Republic crowded into these tiny territories, often using them as staging areas for missionary work. Catholic feudal enclaves were particularly prominent in States Brabant. Within the enclave of Gemert, the Order of Teutonic Knights oversaw a shrine devoted to a relic of the Holy Cross in Handel. The Land of Ravenstein, another island within States Brabant, was ruled from 1630 by the Catholic German elector of Palatine-Neuburg, and fell under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the bishop of Liège.76 The chapel devoted to the Virgin Mary in the Ravenstein town of Uden was run by the Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross. It attracted Catholics in nearby Brabant and the Land of Maas and Waal in the 16th and 17th centuries, and even gained national notoriety in the 18th century.77 A host of other small feudal enclaves littered States Brabant, including the County of Megen and the free lordships of Luyksgestel, Boxmeer, and Bokhoven. Curiously, several of the feudal holdings of the house of Orange, which often associated itself with 74 Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Wijkplaatsen voor vervolgden: asielverlening in Culemborg, Vianen, Buren, Leerdam en IJsselstein van de 16de tot eind 18de eeuw (Dieren: 1984). 75 Calvinists were protected within the enclaves of Culemborg and Vianen during the Dutch Reformation. For the role of these noblemen in the Revolt, see Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London: 1977). In 1590, some Calvinists, unhappy with the nature of the Libertine church in Utrecht, travelled to the Land of IJsselstein. See Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 202–203. The freedom of worship for Lutherans in Woerden seems to have been a result, intended or not, of the fact that the German prince Erik of Brunswick was granted the Grand Seignory of Woerden in exchange for his military service to Philip II. See J. Pont, Geschiedenis van het Lutheranisme in de Nederlanden tot 1618 (Haarlem: 1911), 185–86. 76 Wingens, Over de grens 78–85, 175–206. For information on these and other sites, see Databank Bedevaart en Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland, available online at http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/bedevaart/. 77 The Reformed classis in the Land of Maas and Waal complained about Catholics visiting Uden in 1620. See Boom, “Vestiging,” 225. Because the States built a Reformed garrison church in Ravenstein in 1641, both religions remained effectively legal in the enclave through the end of the ancièn regime.
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orthodox Calvinism, allowed freedom of worship to Dutch Catholics. After the States captured Breda in 1590, the princes of Orange allowed Catholic services in the neighboring feudal inheritance of Hage (or Prinsenhage).78 The Lands of Baarle-Hertog, feudal holdings of the lords of Turnhout, retained Catholic worship even after 1648, when Catholics elsewhere in Generality Lands lost that privilege. A compromise reached in the Treaty of Münster determined that these lands would become part of the Spanish Netherlands, even though they amounted to a series of jurisdictional islands within the Republic. Even today, Baarle-Hertog remains a set of Belgian enclaves within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In fact, feudal privileges offered cover for dissenting worshippers all across the Republic. In Gelderland, autonomous enclaves became centers of Catholic worship. Huissen, for example, fell under the jurisdiction of the duke of Cleves and probably served Catholics in nearby Arnhem.79 Nobles’ castles served a similar function. Den Ham Castle, owned by the Catholic nobles Johan van Wanroy Utenham and his wife Margaretha de Brouxelles, offered protection for Catholics from nearby Vleuten and Utrecht.80 So did the Hernen, Doddendaal, Wijchen, and Leeuwen Castles in the Land of Maas and Waal. In those places, the Reformed churches stood largely empty, while most people worshipped in the new castle churches that developed.81 In fact, though no substantial study has yet to be done on castle churches, they dotted the countryside of Gelderland, Friesland, Utrecht, and Holland.82 Understanding the political relationships these noble castellans maintained at the national, provincial, and local levels may reveal much about the way that Catholics sustained themselves in the Republic.83 The roles of noble patrons also offers historians an important avenue to understand better the roles of women in maintaining systems
78 79
Israel, Dutch Republic, 299–300, 387–88. Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid, 144–45. Israel, Dutch Republic, 652. For other enclaves on the eastern frontier, see idem,
385. 80
Eck, Clandestine Splendor, 25. Boom, “Vestiging.” 82 Wingens, Over de grens, 55. Israel, Dutch Republic, 383. Knippenburg, Religieuze kaart, 29–30. Charles H. Parker calls Catholic nobles with feudal privileges “brokers of interconfessional relations.” See Parker, Faith on the Margins, 159–60. 83 Catholic nobles also often retained their patronage rights over Reformed churches after the Reformation. In 1594, Gerrit van Poelgest even demanded the right to have a role in examining a new minister of Hoogmade, Pieter de Zuttere (aka Petrus Hyperphragmus). See Deursen, Bavianen en Slijkgeuzen, 10–11. 81
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of coexistence. Not only did women’s roles in these systems differ from men’s, but the nature of women’s political and religious authority may have opened to them crucial opportunities to protect religious dissenters. Although excluded from holding offices in the new state system, feudal privileges offered women a range of political authority that, even if it was on the decline, remained significant through the ancièn regime.84 In the Republic, the significant political contacts of Hendrika van Duivenvoorde, a noblewoman from Utrecht, allowed her to host Catholic conventicles at her residence in the Nieuwegracht, where she also housed the apostolic vicar of the Holland Mission from 1621.85 The marchioness Maria Elisabeth II van den Bergh played a similar role in Bergen op Zoom, as did the noblewoman Andriana Veygh at Dreumel.86 Similarly, Louise de Coligny acted as patron for the Remonstrant Brotherhood.87 Though considerable study needs to be done to make more substantive claims, the fact that state laws could not wholly erase feudal privileges seems to have allowed noblewomen an importance beyond their numbers in protecting religious minorities.88 *
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Boundaries need not be on a map to be real. One form of boundary drawing in the early modern world that has earned attention from historians in the northern areas of the Low Countries, that is to say the Dutch Republic, is that between public and private space.89 Utiliz-
84 The classic study of women’s political power in the transition from feudal to state systems is Joan Kelly, “Did Women have a Renaissance” reprinted in Lorna Hutson (ed.), Feminism and Renaissance Studies (Oxford: 1999), 21–47. For a more recent approach, Frances E. Dolan, “Gender and the ‘Lost Spaces of Catholicism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Study 34 (2002): 641–65. 85 Robert Fruin, Verspreide geschriften, part 3 (The Hague: 1901), 300. Israel, Dutch Republic, 378. 86 Mooij, Geloof van bergen verzetten, 399–437; Boom, “Vestiging” 225. 87 Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid, 84–85. 88 For a recent treatment of the religious history of women in the Republic: Judith Pollmann, “Women and Religion in the Dutch Golden Age,” Dutch Crossing 24 (2000): 162–82. A gendered history of confessional coexistence is very much needed. Though the history of women is often presented as an auxiliary to narratives that treat the male experience as normative, it may be that because much of their authority was informal and unofficial, examining women’s experience will transform our understanding of forms of religious coexistence that were also informal and unofficial. 89 For instance, Herman Roodenburg, “On ‘Swelling the Hips and Crossing the Legs: Distinguishing Public and Private in Paintings and Prints from the Dutch Golden Age”
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ing this distinction, historians have gained valuable insights into how religious pluralism operated in the Dutch Republic. Most noticeably, Dutch magistrates usually refused to acknowledge publically the presence of dissenting traditions. In practice, this meant that non-Reformed churches were tolerated as long as expressions of religious difference stayed outside of public spaces. This arrangement did not amount to a nascent separation of church and state, or the emergence of a secular public sphere, however. Public spaces in the Dutch Republic were quite often distinctly religious, particularly in places marked by the presence of the Reformed Church, which retained a near monopoly on public expressions of religion. If people of other faiths wanted to express religious ideas openly, they were usually expected to do so in ways that conformed to the values of the public church.90 Otherwise, most dissenters worshipped in private, though even when they did they remained subject to harassment. Where possible, magistrates promoted a confessionally-neutral Christian culture in public.91 Indeed, many recent historians have agreed that unofficially distinguishing between what was allowed in public and what was relegated to private spaces was at the core of Dutch pluralism.92 In this understanding, the distinction between public and private offered a provisional solution to the deep tension within Dutch society between the ideal of religious uniformity and the reality of religious pluralism. The result, a collaboration between the policy decisions of magistrates and the self-conscious strategies adopted by dissenters, was that most non-Reformed worship took place in private, early on mostly in houses and back rooms. Sometimes people also worshipped in ambassadorial chapels, though through the 17th century dissenters increasingly worshipped in schuilkerken, clandestine churches that looked like ordinary houses or other non-offending, secular structures on the outside.93 There were Lutheran, Remonstrant, Catholic, in Arthur K. Wheelock and Adele Seeff (eds.), The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (Newark, DE: 2000), 64–84. 90 This was the case with national days of prayer. See Peter van Rooden, “Dissenters en bededagen: Civil religion ten tijde van de Republiek,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen Betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 107 (1992): 703–712. 91 On this point, see Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie. On the related concept of omgangsoecumene, see Frijhoff, Embodied Belief. 92 Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 162–96; Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 261–96; Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, 39–65. 93 Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe,” American Historical Review
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and Mennonite schuilkerken all over the Republic. Secret passageways, through which people entered and exited these structures—and sometimes escaped from them—were often located in back alleys. In other cases, passageways provided access to neighboring buildings, from which illegal worshippers, fearing discovery, could exit surreptitiously. In general, this practice of removing religious dissent into the private sphere proved remarkably successful at easing the inherent tension of religious pluralism in a confessional state. Their façade as a legitimate and non-threatening alternative allowed many of those who disapproved of dissenters’ presence to tolerate their existence. Political rhetoric decried the dangers posed by religious dissent, but political action never matched that fervor. This was not a matter of ignorance or naiveté; evidence suggests that awareness of the existence of schuilkerken was widespread—they even became tourist attractions. When the councilor of the Court of Holland visited Gouda in 1643, Calvinist ministers knew their locations well enough to give him directions and describe the approximate sizes of their congregations.94 Ministers frequently urged burgomasters and town councils to crack down on them, though their supplications were often met with little more than lip service. In fact, magistrates sometimes negotiated the terms of their construction. In 1691, Gouda’s regents bargained with a Franciscan on the conditions under which a new schuilkerk might be built.95 In Amsterdam in 1665, magistrates helped resolve conflicts within a local Mennonite congregation over control of the clandestine church.96 As the schuilkerk phenomenon shows, residents of the Republic made a distinction between seeing dissent and knowing that dissent was taking place, between tolerating the presence of those with different ideas and tolerating acts that demonstrated those ideas. It also suggests the critical importance that people placed on maintaining a public space that was confessionally uniform. There is room to believe, however, that these boundaries were as ambiguous and porous as the political boundaries of the era. First, 107 (2002): 1031–64. On the elaborate Catholic schuilkerken, see Eck, Kunst, twist en devotie and idem, Clandestine Splendor. 94 Eck, Kunst, twist en devotie, 129–30. 95 Kaplan, “Fictions of Privacy,” 1047. For a case in Breda, see Charles de Mooij, “Second-class yet self-confident: Catholics in the Dutch Generality Lands” in Kaplan et al. (eds.), Catholic Communities in Protestant States, 163. 96 Gelder, Getemperde vrijheid, 93.
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in places where dissenting congregations formed the majority of the population, as Catholics did in States Brabant or the Land of Maas and Waal, the public-private distinction is hardly adequate. When less than 5 percent of the population worshipped within the ‘public’ church, while 95 percent worshiped in a ‘private’ church, the categories appear insufficient at the very least.97 Crowded castle churches in places with such decisive Catholic majorities may have amounted to private spaces architecturally but socially speaking the situation was reversed; it was the few isolated Calvinists in the supposedly ‘public’ churches who were really isolated. Second, religious dissenters themselves sometimes self-consciously challenged the expectations that they remain in private. In the North Holland town of Limmen in 1635, for example, a priest organized a public exorcism that drew a substantial crowd.98 Only four kilometers to the north, at Heiloo, unashamed pilgrims visited the site of Our Lady at Peril, even after authorities tore down the chapel. Similar conditions developed in Eikenduinen (near The Hague), Nibbiwoud (near Hoorn), and elsewhere.99 In ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Catholics continued to commemorate their dead in confessionally-identifiable ways, despite the Reformed government’s efforts to quash these expressions.100 The distinctive habit worn by the nearly 5,000 Spiritual Virgins in the Republic surely distinguished them from their neighbors and acted as a public demonstration of religious difference.101 On his 1687 visit to Amsterdam, Thomas Penson certainly noticed that the Beguines too wore their habits openly.102 At Amersfoort, Catholics held processions in the streets. In Gouda, crucifixes were sold openly. Indeed, as Christine Kooi has suggested, Catholics self-consciously
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Boom, “Vestiging,” 223; Israel, Dutch Republic, 659. Deursen, Plain Lives, 249. 99 For information about all these pilgrimage sites within the Republic’s borders, see Databank Bedevaart en Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland; Pollmann, “Burying the dead,” 88. 100 Pollman, “Burying the dead,” 96–97. 101 Dorren, Eenheid en verscheidenheid, 160. On the Spiritual Virgins, see Marit Monteiro, Geestelijke maagden: leven tussen klooster en wereld in Noord-Nederland gedurende de zeventiende eeuw (Hilversum: 1996). 102 Thomas Penson, “Penson’s Short Progress into Holland, Flanders and France” in Kees van Strien (ed.), Touring the Low Countries: Accounts of British Travellors, 1660–1720 (Amsterdam: 1998), 40. 98
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and repeatedly challenged the expectation that they restrict religious expression to the private sphere.103 Other dissenting churches retained publicly-identifiable expressions of faith as well. The most dramatic example is Amsterdam’s Lutheran community, which opened an immense church in 1633 on Het Spui in the city center, only a short walk away from a Mennonite schuilkerk (Het Lam) and the Catholic Begijnhof. In 1662, they were permitted to build another church, the so-called Round Lutheran church, about 1.3 kilometers to the north.104 More research on the variety of ways that people expressed their religious identity, through rituals as well as other material and aural expressions, will be useful in the coming years to understand the nature of confessional arrangements with more precision. My own research in nearby Wesel has suggested that finding limited and non-threatening expressions of confessional difference in public was, in fact, critical to the function of religious pluralism.105 It may be that public spaces were not nearly as confessionally homogenous as many historians have suggested, and as magistrates and ministers had hoped. *
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While once treated as a national characteristic, religious toleration in the Dutch Republic was more complicated. This essay has even suggested that looking beyond the borders of the Republic itself offers critical insights into the nature of Dutch pluralism. First, if the northern provinces in the Low Countries experienced greater religious diversity than many places in early modern Europe, including the Spanish Netherlands, many of the ways this functioned may not have been so different. Second, by casting our eyes beyond the borders of the Republic, we can appreciate the limitations that historians have placed on their own research when they confine themselves to the geographical borders of states. Doing so privileges to a degree the aspirations of political officials, whose very authority was defined by their ability to
103 Kooi, “Sub jugo Haereticorum: Minority Catholicism in Early Modern Europe” in Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (eds.), Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J. (Toronto: 2001), 158. 104 Elsewhere, Lutherans faced conditions much like other dissenting churches. Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie, 103–4; Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 175–6; Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 273–74. 105 Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 179–220.
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regulate those borders. Last, the very nature of spatial boundaries offers insights into the function of religious pluralism. On the one hand, borders provided a sense of social and religious order; in a physical sense political boundaries defined the authority of both church and state. The boundaries distinguishing the domestic sphere from public space similarly distinguished the authority of householders. On the other hand, because both kinds of borders were only invisible lines invented by humans, they were not only historically contingent, but they were also remarkably fluid. In the early modern era, borders between states were constantly changing, legal jurisdictions were uncertain and contested, and the boundary between public and private space remained remarkably unclear. These facts left room for many people to find an arrangement that could satisfy their own conscience, without troubling their neighbors or threatening their religious and political leaders.
MULTICONFESSIONALISM IN A COMMERCIAL METROPOLIS: THE CASE OF 16TH-CENTURY ANTWERP Guido Marnef From the 1520’s onward, Antwerp developed into one of the biggest centers of Protestantism in the Low Countries. The cosmopolitan, trading metropolis was, in fact, open to outside influences and quickly absorbed Protestant ideas and movements of different natures.1 Charles V and his central government in Brussels urged a strict repression of every form of religious dissent, expecting from the local authorities a loyal application of the heresy placards. The Antwerp city fathers realized that such a harsh policy posed a serious threat to the welfare of their booming city. They were well aware that the early Lutheran movement recruited merchants and other well-to-do people. They especially feared that foreign merchants affected by Lutheran ideas might leave the city. Later on, the Antwerp city government would take the same attitude towards Portuguese conversos and Calvinists.2 In general, the city fathers succeeded in maintaining Antwerp’s privileges and autonomy and in reconciling the prosecution of heresy with the city’s economic interests. They focused their heresy repression on the more modest Anabaptists who did not significantly contribute to the Antwerp economy. In theory, Antwerp remained a religiously homogeneous city, in which the Catholic Church enjoyed a monopoly position. In practice, however, this position was more and more affected by several religious reform movements, especially Lutheranism, Anabaptism, and Calvinism, and by the existence of large religious middle groups—people who stood between the orthodox Catholic Church and one of the Protestant confessions. These “fluctuantes in fide” could no longer reconcile themselves to a number of practices or articles of faith of the Catholic Church and found some points in common with the
1 Guido Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis, 1550–1577 (Baltimore: 1996). 2 See Guido Marnef, “Charles V’s religious policy and the Antwerp market: A confrontation of different interests?” in Marc Boone and Marysa Demoor (eds.), Charles V in Context: the Making of a European Identity (Ghent: 2003), 21–33.
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Protestant reformers.3 As a result, the accustomed equation of civic and sacral community increasingly came under pressure. Things became even more complicated when the drive for religious and political change intertwined. This happened during the Wonderyear or annus mirabilis (Spring 1566–Spring 1567) and during the so-called “Calvinist Republic” (1577–1585), when the Calvinist and Lutheran churches came into the open and experienced an undisputable, though short-lived period of expansion. In this essay, I shall focus on these two episodes, showing how the Antwerp city government tried to supersede religious division, and how it tried to organize a well-ordered society in which there was room for more than one religion. The Wonderyear and the First Experiment of Multiconfessionalism The Wonderyear, the year of the petition, the mass open-air preaching, and the wave of iconoclasm, profoundly changed the political and religious situation in the Low Countries.4 The petition presented to the Regent, Margaret of Parma, on 5 April 1566, in which the confederate nobility demanded that the Inquisition be abolished and the heresy placards suspended, found an immediate echo among and fostered the self-confidence of Calvinists and Lutherans. Calvinist exiles, including a substantial number of preachers, returned to the Netherlands and joined the existing congregations. In June 1566, a Calvinist synod, held in Antwerp, decided it was time to come out into the open. In Antwerp, the so-called hedge-preaching, held outside the city walls, attracted crowds numbering hundreds and even thousands. In August, tensions increased as Calvinist leaders demanded the right to preach within the city walls. On 20 August the image-breaking started. It was a planned and well-organized enterprise, endorsed by the Calvinist consistory. The iconoclasm was not only ideologically determined, but
3
Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation, 56–58. For the general context, see Andrew Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt. Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford: 1992), ch. 5 and Guido Marnef, “The dynamics of Reformed militancy in the Low Countries: the Wonderyear” in N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree, and Henk van Nierop (eds.), The Education of a Christian Society. Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands (Aldershot: 1999), 193–210. 4
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it also constituted an acte de presence, by which the Calvinist leaders wanted to emphasize their rights within the city.5 On 23 August, a perplexed Regent conceded that preaching would be allowed where it was already taking place. The noble grandees were expected to restore order in their provinces and to stop the iconoclasm. Under strong pressure, Margaret of Parma gave in, though she told Philip II that she preferred to be torn to pieces rather than being the first to allow several religions.6 William of Orange was sent to turbulent Antwerp. He realized that an agreement on religious matters with the adherents of the new religion was necessary in order to appease the situation. He invited the Dutch and French Calvinist Church to appoint deputies who could negotiate a settlement. These negotiations led to the accord of 2 September 1566, which was extended the same day to the Lutherans, who had also organized public activities since July.7 The central idea behind the 2 September accord was that tensions in urban society caused by religious division should be ceased, something we also see in the pacification edicts proclaimed in France. The beginning of the text of the accord was very clear: In order that all unrest and discord in matters of religion arisen in this city cease and all citizens and inhabitants henceforth might live in all quietness, peace, love and friendship; furthermore that trade might come in the old train and this city might be liberated from all further inconveniences . . .8
The accord granted the Calvinists and Lutherans three vacant lots within the city walls, where they could preach on Sundays and holy days—and on Wednesdays in weeks without a holy day. All preachers were obliged to take an oath of loyalty to William of Orange, and the city government, and they had to be obedient in all political affairs.
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For developments in Antwerp, see Robert Van Roosbroeck, Het Wonderjaar te Antwerpen, 1566–1567. Inleiding tot de studie van de godsdiensttroebelen te Antwerpen van 1566 tot 1585 (Antwerp: 1930) and Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation, ch. 6. 6 Juliaan J. Woltjer, Tussen vrijheidsstrijd en burgeroorlog. Over de Nederlandse Opstand 1555–1580 (Amsterdam: 1994), 34–35; Violet Soen, “Par la voye de pacification et negotiation. Verzet, verzoening en ‘vredehandel’ tijdens de Nederlandse Opstand (1564–1598)”( Ph.D. diss, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2008), 208–210. 7 The text of the accord is in Pieter Génard (ed.), “Personen te Antwerpen in de XVIe eeuw, voor het feit van religie gerechtelijk vervolgd: Lijst en ambtelijke stukken” Antwerpsch Archievenblad 11 (s.d.): 48–51, 63–65. 8 Ibid., 48.
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Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans were forbidden to use injurious or seditious language towards the civil authorities or towards those belonging to another religion. Orange and the city government promised to protect all inhabitants living in obedience, peace, and unity, regardless the religion to which they belonged. The agreement was provisional; the king, after taking the advice of the States General, might decide otherwise. The 2 September accord was a milestone in the development of Calvinism and Lutheranism in Antwerp. It created, in fact, a multiconfessional urban society within which Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans could live, work, and worship, protected by a legal framework. The Anabaptists who had built up a well-organized, underground community in Antwerp also tried to profit from the changed situation. They emphasized their obedience to the civil authorities and asked William of Orange to be brought within the scope of the 2 September accord. Orange and the Antwerp city fathers declined this request.9 The Anabaptists’ radical ideas, including the rejection of infant baptism, public oaths, and military service undoubtedly made them religiously and socially unacceptable. The Calvinists and Lutherans experienced a significant expansion after their official recognition. Characteristic for the strength of the Calvinist Church was the speed with which they built new churches on their assigned places. Already on 25 September the Calvinists had started construction of a church at the ‘Mollekensraam’, a church destined for the Dutch-speaking congregation with room for 10,000 people. Men, women, and even children took a hand in the building. Rich Calvinist citizens supplied considerable amounts of money, and some well-to-do women donated their gold and jewels.10 That the Calvinists succeeded in building two new churches—one for the Dutch- and another for the French-speaking community—within a relatively short timespan once again underscores the social strength of the Calvinist congregation.11 The intense building process and the appearance of new temples in the city landscape undoubtedly impressed friend and
9 W. Balke, “De invloed van de Anabaptisten te Antwerpen,” Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis 70 (1987): 52–53; Marnef, Antwerp, 91. 10 Robert Van Roosbroeck (ed.), De kroniek van Godevaert van Haecht over de troebelen van 1565 tot 1574 te Antwerpen en elders, vol. 1 (Antwerp: 1928), 121–122. 11 For the changed social profile of the Antwerp Calvinists during the Wonderyear, see Marnef, Antwerp, ch. 6.
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foe. In passing, it should be noted that the arrangements negotiated by William of Orange with the representatives of the Calvinists and Lutherans went far beyond the instructions given by the Regent to the grandees. Margaret of Parma only wanted to allow preaching where it had already taken place, meaning Antwerp, outside and not inside the city walls. The building of churches was clearly not intended. Furthermore, though Margaret only envisaged preaching, the Calvinists and Lutherans also celebrated the Lord’s Supper and performed baptisms and marriages. On paper, the September accord offered Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans the prospect of a peaceful communal life under the auspices of the civil authorities. Yet, everyday reality was completely different. The politico-religious turmoil of the Wonderyear created a climate of increasing tension and confrontation. In the days and weeks following the iconoclasm, the degree of devastation in churches and convents made worship in several places impossible. At the same time, many priests were hiding inside or outside the city, while others were mocked and insulted in the streets. There were, however, Catholic clergy men who tried to stop the Calvinist and Lutheran expansion. A few Franciscans and Jesuits preached against their religious adversaries, which was a violation of the September accord. In November 1566, a number of Catholics, including some leading Antwerp priests and agents of the Spanish king, started a political opposition movement. When the plans leaked out at the end of December, the climate became even more tense than before.12 There was also growing tension between Calvinists and Lutherans. The discord had religious and political grounds. The Lutheran doctrine of the Lord’s Supper differed radically from the Calvinist. The controversy came even more to the fore because the leaders of the Antwerp Lutheran community called in German preachers and theologians, who were almost all violent, anti-Calvinist followers of the gnesioLutheran line of Matthias Flacius. Two Antwerp church leaders admitted that they differed from the Calvinists “as the sky does from the earth”. Another element of friction was the attitude taken towards the secular authorities. During the Calvinist riots, the Lutherans refused to 12
Van Roosbroeck, Het Wonderjaar, 189–208; Marnef, Antwerp, 103–104; B. A. Vermaseren, “The life of Antonio del Corro (1527–1591). Before his stay in England. II. Minister in Antwerp (Nov. 1566–April 1567),” Archief en Bibliotheekwezen in België 61 (1990): 183–186.
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join the Calvinists in attacking the town hall, arguing that they had no permission from the city government and that they rejected violence. In March 1567, after the defeat of the rebel army at nearby Oosterweel, the Calvinists tried to seize power in Antwerp. The Lutherans remained loyal to the civic authorities and joined the Catholics in resisting. The Calvinist leaders perceived this as a betrayal of the Protestant cause and continued to consider the Antwerp’s Lutherans as politically unreliable.13 The Antwerp chronicler Godevaert van Haecht, who had moderate Lutheran leanings, summarized things quite well when he wrote: There was an immense discord among people, between friends, sisters, and brothers. The one praised this and the other that, and they slandered each other . . . The one said: “You are eaters of flesh and drinkers of blood”, while others said: “You are Schwärmer and iconoclasts”, etc.14
It is clear that the antagonism between Catholics and Protestants and between Calvinists and Lutherans impeded the development of a stable multiconfessional society. The radicalization of the political situation added fuel to the fire. In the autumn and winter of 1566, the Calvinist leaders openly chose political resistance, and the Antwerp Calvinist Church acted as the headquarters of the rebel movement. At the same time, the regent and her central government gained confidence and took up the struggle with the rebels. In March–April 1567, royal troops defeated the rebel armies and quelled the rebellious towns. The Antwerp Calvinists and Lutherans realized they had lost the battle. The last Calvinist and Lutheran preaching took place on 9 April, and two days later William of Orange and many Calvinists and Lutherans left the city. 15 Margaret of Parma conducted a program of pacification and chastisement that took into account the existing privileges and jurisdictions. The duke of Alva, who reached the Low Countries with his Spanish army in August 1567, went much further. He set up a special court, the Council of Troubles, and launched a harsh repression, focusing on the culprits of the troubles during the Wonderyear. The Protestant communities of Antwerp were driven underground again.16
13 14 15 16
Marnef, Antwerp, 102–103. Van Roosbroeck, Kroniek van Godevaert van Haecht, I, 122. Marnef, Antwerp, 105; idem., “Dynamics of Reformed militancy,” 205–208. Marnef, Antwerp, ch. 7.
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Toward the “Provisional” Religious Peace of 1578 The conditions of the Antwerp Protestants changed after the proclamation of the Pacification of Ghent (8 November 1576). This agreement between the rebellious provinces of Holland and Zeeland and the provinces loyal to the king declared the heresy placards suspended and aimed at the withdrawal of the Spanish troops. From then onward, things changed quickly in Flanders and Brabant. Calvinist exiles returned and developed new activities—it was a scenario that resembled the situation after the presentation of the petition of 1566.17 At the same time, a process of political radicalization started in the southern provinces, especially in Flanders and Brabant. The Spanish governor, Don Juan of Austria, lost much support, while William of Orange gained influence. The Antwerp city fathers were nonetheless forced to conduct a moderate policy, because the Spanish citadel, built by the duke of Alva, still harbored a Spanish garrison. In August 1577, soldiers in the service of the States succeeded in reconquering it. Free from Spanish soldiers, the city government chose to rely on their own military forces, which consisted of six shooting companies and the civic militia. The city fathers more and more followed the political line of William of Orange and the rebellious States-General. The precocious renewal of the town magistracy by representatives of the States-General heralded the beginning of a new political order. This did not mean that the Antwerp city government would be dominated by convinced Calvinist. The Calvinist take-over was a gradual process, although the renewal of the town magistracy in November 1579 was an important milestone. In any case, the Calvinist henceforth profited from the political situation. They were staunch supporters of the revolt, while many perceived the Catholics—the Catholic clergy and especially the Jesuits—as allies of the Spaniards. Furthermore, William of Orange and his court, including two Calvinist ministers, had resided in the Antwerp citadel since the beginning of 1578. Their
17 Johan Decavele, “Het herstel van het Calvinisme in Vlaanderen in de eerste jaren na de pacificatie van Gent (1577–1578)” in Dirk van der Bauwhede and Marc Goetinck (eds.), Brugge in de Geuzentijd. Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van de hervorming te Brugge en in het Brugse Vrije tijdens de 16de eeuw (Bruges: 1982), 11–12; Woltjer, Tussen vrijheidsstrijd, 71–74.
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presence undoubtedly provided an element of support for the Antwerp Calvinist Church.18 William of Orange realized that the rapidly changing religious situation needed an adequate solution. He was, in a certain way, confronted with a dilemma: the permission for the public exercise of the Calvinist religion could cause serious discord, while a prohibition could incite the common people to seize arms, attack the clergy, and despoil their churches. Initially, Orange tried to prevent the public exercise of the Calvinist religion in Flanders and Brabant and proposed freedom of conscience, so that the Reformed “might fall no more under that tyrannous and intolerable persecution, which they have heretofore suffered and endured”. Yet, the Calvinists in Ghent, Antwerp, and other towns pressed for freedom of worship, including the right to conduct public services.19 It was in this complex situation that proposals for a religious peace or “Religionsfried” were launched. Orange and his advisors undoubtedly played a significant role in this initiative. It is less easy to evaluate the position of Matthias of Austria, the new regent appointed by the States-General. From a formal perspective, he was closely involved, but it is far from clear whether he really played an active role. It is not impossible that he was influenced by the strongly irenic tendency that existed at the Viennesse court of his father and uncle, Emperor Maximilian II (1564–1576) and Rudolf II (1576–1612) respectively.20 As early as the beginning of June 1578, ideas and proposals for a religious peace appeared on the agenda of the rebel government. On 6 June the States-General appointed a committee to work out proposals for the appeasement of the religious situation.21 One of the committee’s solutions was to proclaim a religious peace in order “to
18 For the changing political context, see Guido Marnef, “Brabants calvinisme in opmars: de weg naar de calvinistische republieken te Antwerpen, Brussel en Mechelen, 1577–1580,” Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis 70 (1987): 7–21; idem, “The process of political change under the Calvinist Republic in Antwerp (1577–1585)” in Monique Weiss (ed.), Des villes en révolte. Les ‘Républiques urbaines’ aux Pays-Bas et en France pendant la deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle (Turnhout: 2010), 25–33. 19 See the letters of William Davison to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 12 April 1578, and of Lord Cobham to William Cecil, 5 July 1578, in Joseph Kervyn de Lettenhove (ed.), Relations politiques des Pays-Bas et de l’Angleterre sous le règne de Philippe II, vol. 10 (Brussels: 1899), 410–411, 569. 20 Howard Louthan, The Quest for Compromise. Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna (Cambridge, UK: 1997), ch. 9. 21 N. Japikse (ed.), Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal, vol. 2 (The Hague: 1917), 436.
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impede the dissidence and the partiality which were augmenting in several towns day by day to the benefit of the common enemy”.22 On 9 June William of Orange and the members of the Council of State proposed a religious peace23 like that of the Holy Roman Empire and other places. Orange asked the States-General to deliberate about such an accord, as was provided in the Pacification of Ghent.24 Article 5 of the Pacification treaty stipulated that the heresy placards “shall be suspended and shall not be put into operation until the States-General shall ordain otherwise”.25 Several Catholic representatives immediately replied that they could not agree with such an interpretation. They wanted to respect the Pacification, but at the same time they considered the Ghent treaty as a vehicle for the maintenance of the Catholic religion. Under no condition were they prepared to allow changes in the religious situation.26 William of Orange tried to convince the States-General by referring to the salutary effects of the free exercise of religion in the Holy Empire, Poland, and Denmark, but it was all in vain. The representatives of Artois, Hainaut, and other places did not yield, and the religious peace proposal was rejected by majority vote.27 The States of Brabant, to which the city of Antwerp belonged, was divided on the issue. The prelates and nobles were against, while the towns, which formed the third estate, were in favor.28
22 Letter of Jacques Mastaert and Jacques Yman to the town magistracy of Bruges, 8 June 1578, in A.-C. de Schrevel (ed.), Recueil de documents relatifs aux troubles religieux en Flandre 1577–1584, vol. 1 (Bruges 1921), 396–397. 23 In contemporary sources, the religious peace was mostly labeled with the German expression ‘Religionsfried’. See for instance the letter of Anoine de Caulers, representative of Artois in the States-General, 15 June 1578: “la Religionsfrit (qu’ilz appellant), c’est à dire la liberté de religions avecq leurs exercises”, quoted in C. H. T. Bussemaker, De Afscheiding der Waalsche gewesten van de Generale Unie, vol. 2 (Haarlem: 1896), 342. 24 Bussemaker, Afscheiding, II, 324. 25 E. H. Kossmann and A. F. Mellink (eds.), Texts concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands (Cambridge, UK: 1974), 128. 26 Article 4 of the Pacification stipulated that it “should not be allowed to disturb the common peace and quiet outside the provinces Holland, Zeeland, and associated places, or in particular to attack the Roman Catholic religion and practice”. Ibid., 128. 27 Ingelram de Cherf to the magistracy of Ypres, 9–10 June 1578, in De Schrevel, Recueil, I, 398–399, and the letter of Antoine de Caulers, 15 June 1578 in Bussemaker, Afscheiding, II, 343–345. Compare the letter of Jan van der Warck, Antwerp city pensionary, 15 June 1578, in Rijksarchief Zeeland, Archief Jan van den Warck, 2, n° 78–C1. 28 Aviso from Antwerp, 15 June 1578, in: Archivo General de Simancas, Estado Alemán, leg. 685.
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Still, in June 1578, there came a new attempt from another angle. The national synod of Calvinist churches, assembled at Dordrecht (3–18 June), also worked out a religious peace proposal. On 22 June deputies of the synod presented the request to the States-General.29 It was addressed to the Regent, Matthias of Austria, and the Council of State and contained an ample plea for freedom of religion.30 The authors referred to the persecutions by the Spaniards, which had not stopped the growth of the Reformed religion, and to the sly ruses of Don Juan to divide Catholics and Protestants in the Low Countries. They denied that several religions could not peacefully co-exist in one society by mentioning historical and contemporary examples. They especially highlighted the positive contribution of the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the pacification edicts proclaimed in France. Even the Jews—farther from Christianity than the Protestants—had received permission from the pope to build synagogues in Rome. The express reference to the Peace of Augsburg might surprise at first sight, given the “cuius regio, eius religio” principle. Yet, Article 27 of the peace made an exception for some of the free imperial cities of the Empire. In these places, Catholics and Lutherans could enjoy freedom of religion and worship on an equal basis.31 The authors of the request explicitly mentioned the legislated biconfessionality.32 The representatives of the Dordrecht synod concluded their plea with the request that the States-General allowed the free exercise of their religion, relying on the Pacification of Ghent. For the Calvinist leaders this freedom was an essential prerequisite for the expansion of their church in those provinces where it was not yet officially allowed, particularly in Flanders and Brabant. The arguments developed by the Calvinist deputies largely coincided with those presented by William of Orange to the States-General earlier that month. Their request for a religious peace received an immediate reply: on the same day, the Council of State and the States-
29 Philip of Marnix to the States of Holland and Zeeland, 25 June 1578, in: Aloïs Gerlo and Rudolf de Smet (eds.), Marnixi epistulae. De briefwisseling van Marnix van Sint-Aldegonde. Een kritische uitgave (Brussels: 1992), II, 252. 30 The text is in De Schrevel, Recueil, I, 460–471. 31 Olivier Christin, La paix de religion. L’autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle (Paris: 1997), 299–300. 32 De Schrevel, Recueil, I, 468. Also Catholic Netherlandish authors knew about this specific arrangement in the Empire. See e.g. P. A. M. Geurts, De Nederlandse Opstand in pamfletten 1566–1584 (Utrecht: 1983), 246.
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General drew up a concept for a religious peace that dealt with the problem in a concrete way.33 The concept guaranteed that henceforth everyone would be free in the exercise of his religion and would have the right to appropriate church services until a national or general assembly decided otherwise. In Holland and Zeeland, the exercise of the Catholic religion would be allowed again, if at least 100 families in a town or big village, or a majority in smaller places, asked for it. The same principle applied to the Calvinists outside Holland and Zeeland. The local magistracies were expected to assign the necessary places for worship, if possible in such a way that the two religions did not hinder each other. Several measures provided a framework for the peaceful coexistence of the adherents of both religions. This implied that public offices, education, and poor relief were open to both. All civil and ecclesiastical servants had to promise loyalty (by oath) to the religious peace and the Council of State, and the States-General controlled the proclamation and maintenance of the peace. Yet, this proposal met immediate resistance in the States-General. Several representatives were completely opposed to it, while others thought they were not sufficiently authorized to decide such an important matter.34 A new request, submitted by the Antwerp Calvinists and the Antwerp colonels, pressed for a new settlement but did not change the essence of the matter.35 On 12 July 1578 Matthias of Austria and the Council of State decided to forward a new concept for a religious peace to the Netherlandish provinces.36 It was already late July when the concept was sent to the States of Brabant.37 In the meanwhile, the Antwerp colonels and the captains of the civic militia continued
33
The concept of ‘Religionsfried’ in De Schrevel, Recueil, I, 448–459. See Charles van de Rhyne to the magistracy of Ypres, 9 Jule 1578 and a letter of the States of Hainaut to several towns, 18 July 1578, in De Schrevel, Recueil, I, 486– 487, and Antonios de Traos to Count William of Hesse, 17 July 1578, in Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, Bestand 4, Abteilung F, Niederlande, 263. 35 The committee of eight colonels was appointed by the magistracy in February 1578. The colonels not only played a crucial role in the defense of the city, they also exercised a considerable influence in political and religious matters. See Floris Prims, De kolonellen van de ‘burgersche wacht’ te Antwerpen (December 1577–Augustus 1585) (Antwerp: 1942). 36 Japikse, Resolutiën, II, 436–437; the letter of Charles van de Rhyne, mentioned in the previous note, and Marnix to the city government of Ghent, 28 July 1578, in Gerlo and De Smet, Marnixi epistulae, II, 260–261. For the text of this new concept, see De Schrevel, Recueil, I, 492–503. This concept slightly differs from the one of 22 June 1578. 37 Japikse, Resolutiën, II, 437. 34
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to agitate for the introduction of a religious peace. They presented a new request to Regent Matthias, and the colonels even appeared in the assembly of the States-General to articulate their demands.38 They also pressed the prelates and nobles of Brabant to accept the religious peace. Yet, the first and second estate of the States of Brabant declined, arguing that the matter should be treated in the States-General.39 In the Antwerp Broad Council40 the problem of the religious peace first appeared on the agenda 23 August 1578. That day, Burgomaster Jan van Stralen explained on behalf of the magistracy “the matter and perplexity which is in this city caused by the requested exercise of the Religion called the Reformed”. He referred to the concept of religious peace, sent on behalf of the Council of State and the States-General to the provinces, and he asked the members of the Council to formulate their opinion.41 The magistracy did not await the decision-making process in the Broad Council. The Antwerp city fathers undoubtedly took into account the pressure by the colonels, the captains of the civic militia, and the deans of the shooting companies. Furthermore, the quick expansion of the Calvinists induced action. Their public preaching attracted more and more people—in one case even as many as 2,000 to 3,000.42 After consultation with the States of Brabant, Matthias of Austria and the Council of State, and a number of Calvinist ministers and consistory members, the magistracy decided to proclaim the religious peace on 29 August. At the request of the city fathers it
38 Ibid., 437, and Hubert Languet to Count August of Saxony, 16 August 1578, in Hubert Languet, Arcano seculi decimi sexti. Huberti Langueti epistolae secretae ad principem suum Augustum Sax. ducem et S.R.I. septem virum, ed. J. P. Ludovicus (Halle: 1699), 750. See also the letter of the captains of the civic militia to the colonels, s.d. [1578], in Stadsarchief Antwerp [henceforth: SAA], Privilegekamer, 2364, n° 106. 39 Opinion of 12 August 1578, in: L. P. Gachard (ed.), Actes des États Généraux des Pays-Bas, 1576–1585, vol. 1 (Brussels: 1861), 412–413. 40 The Broad Council [Brede Raad] comprised four types of members: the magistracy [magistraat] as first members, the ancient or former aldermen [oudschepenen] as second members, four headmen [hoofdmannen] and 26 wardmasters [wijkmeesters] as third members, and the deans of the craft guilds as fourth members. Before 1577, the Broad Council assembled sporadically. During the “Calvinist Republic” this body developed into a quasi-permanent assembly, deliberating not only about fiscal but also about political and religious issues. See Marnef, Antwerp, 17–18, and Idem, “Process of political change”. 41 SAA, Privilegekamer, 1951, fol. 74r°. 42 See the letters of Hubert Languet to August of Saxony, 19 July and 16 August 1578, in: Languet, Arcano seculi decimi sexti, 743, 750.
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was signed by Matthias of Austria, William of Orange, and the consistory members of the Calvinist Church.43 The preamble of the religious peace emphasized that it was provisional until a final resolution of the States-General decided the matter. Until that time, the Calvinists had permission to conduct preaching, the Lord’s Supper, baptism, and other services. The magistracy assigned them four places of worship: the House of Aken, which had belonged to the Jesuits, the chapel at the Spanish citadel, and two commercial buildings. There were also articles that invited mutual understanding between the adherents of the Catholic and Calvinist Churches. The Calvinist ministers and consistory members had to be admitted by the city magistracy, to which they had to promise loyalty and obedience “in all political matters”. As regarding feast days and the sale and eating of meat, they had to behave “politically” and to respect the ordinances of the city government. Violators of the religious peace would be punished “as rebels and disturbers of the common peace and welfare”. The colonels, civic militia, and shooting companies and the ministers and consistory members had to take care of the maintenance of the religious peace. On 6 September 1578, the religious peace was extended to the Lutherans who had petitioned Matthias of Austria and the Council of State to be included. Henceforth, they were allowed to exercise their religion on the same conditions as the Calvinists. They got three places of worship: the barn of the Saint Michael abbey, the chapel of the clothshearers and the attic of the Hessenhouse.44 On 6 October 1578, there was yet another adjustment of the religious peace, this time in favor of the Calvinists. They obtained three more places, since the size of their community continued to increase: the front part of the Franciscan church, including the Italian chapel; the church of the Dominicans without the choir; and the Saint Andrew church, one of five Antwerp parish churches. This extension of the religious peace was signed not only by Matthias of Austria, William of Orange, the magistracy, and four ministers of the Dutch-speaking Calvinist Church, but also by six colonels, confirming once again their strong influence.45 The arrangements relating to the Dominican and Franciscan churches meant that 43
The text of the religious peace of 29 August 1578 is in SAA, Privilegekamer, 82, fols. 134v°–137r°. 44 Japikse, Resolutiën, II, 437; SAA, Privilegekamer, 82, fols. 137v°–140v°. 45 The text in Ibid., fols. 141r°–142r°.
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for the first time in Antwerp history two rival confessions shared the same church building in a legally sanctioned way. This situation resembled the so-called simultaneum, practiced in a number of German towns after the proclamation of the Peace of Augsburg (1555).46 That the religious peace of 29 August 1578 was extended twice within one month accentuates its provisional character—hence it was not without reason described as the “provisional religious peace”. The Antwerp city fathers did not wait until the States-General tackled the religious problems. Rather, they adapted the proclaimed accord to meet local needs. The extension of 6 October even mentioned that the Calvinists should be content with the extra, assigned places, “unless they needed more on account of the growth of their community”.47 It is equally remarkable that the Broad Council debated the religious peace post factum. At the beginning of October, the prelates and nobles of Brabant had resumed discussion of a concept of religious peace referred to them by the Council of State. For the sake of unity, they consented to the proclamation of the religious peace in the Duchy of Brabant.48 It is not clear what exactly caused their change of attitude. In any case, the Broad Council as a part of the third estate of Brabant started discussions. On 9 October Burgomaster Jan van Stralen informed the Broad Council that the magistracy joined the decision of the prelates and nobles. The other members of the Broad Council were requested to offer their opinion about the religious peace as well. The old aldermen, wardmasters, and deans of the guilds did so on 13 and 15 October.49 In general, they agreed. The most important remark related to the fact that the Lutherans were not mentioned in the concept. The wardmasters declared that the word “Reformed” was not applicable to adherents of the Confession of Augsburg, who had to be mentioned as such.50 In passing, it should be noticed that the Anabaptists, who had built an important community in the past decades,51 were never mentioned in the text of the religious peace. This omission
46 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith. Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge, MA: 2007), 198–203, 211–217. 47 SAA, Privilegekamer, 82, fol. 141r°. 48 See the opinion of 3 October 1578 in SAA, Privilegekamer, 1568, fols. 295v°– 296v°. 49 SAA, Privilegekamer, 1951, fols. 91v°–93r°, 94v°–99r°. 50 Ibid., fol. 93r°. 51 Marnef, Antwerp, ch. 5 and 9.
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seems to indicate that the city government still considered them not sufficiently respectable to be included. This “provisional” religious peace of August 1578 was an important step for Antwerp’s Calvinists and Lutherans, just as was the September 1566 accord. Henceforth, they could expand their churches in an officially sanctioned way. No province in the Low Countries accepted the religious peace proposed by William of Orange in June 1578. The acceptance and execution of such a peace remained an urban matter. Besides Antwerp, there were at least 27 other towns that decided to introduce it. There were, on the contrary, provinces where it found no ground. In the Walloon provinces, the religious peace was never proclaimed, and in Holland and Zeeland only the city of Haarlem proclaimed it.52 The proclamation and maintenance of the peace was primarily a pragmatic matter. Ubachs rightly observed that the proposed mutual tolerance was in the first place an escape route in order to join forces against Spain and to prevent a civil war.53 In Antwerp elements were at work which undoubtedly contributed to the proclamation of a religious peace, such as the economicallyinspired openness of the city government and the presence of William of Orange and Matthias of Austria with their courts. Antwerp was, together with Brussels, also the only city which included the Lutherans in the religious peace.54 In Antwerp, religious relationships developed that were more moderate than those in Flanders. There, Ghent became the citadel of an aggressively expansive Calvinism. There the Calvinist movement had made such progress by the second half of 1578 that the Catholic Church was completely under pressure. The religious peace proclaimed at Ghent in December 1578, after intense lobbying by William of Orange, aimed at the re-allowance and public exercise of the Catholic faith.55
52
P. J. H. Ubachs, “De Nederlandse religievrede van 1578,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 77 (1997): 54–56. See also the list p. 55, to which Dendermonde should be added. 53 Ibid., 51. 54 For Brussels, see Guido Marnef, “Het Protestantisme te Brussel onder de ‘Calvinistische Republiek’, ca. 1577–1585” in: W. P. Blockmans and H. Van Nuffel (eds.), Staat en Religie in de 15e en 16e eeuw (Brussels: 1986), 231–299, esp. 243–246. 55 See for a comparison between Antwerp and Brussels the letter of William Davison to William Cecil, 1 September 1578, in Kervyn de Lettenhove, Relations politiques, X, 786, and André Despretz, “De instauratie der Gentse Calvinistische Republiek (1577–1579),” Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent 17 (1963): 177–179.
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The religious peace of August 1578 enabled Calvinists and Lutherans to realize further expansion within a short time span. Yet, the proclamation of religious peace agreements could not prevent further political polarization. It was especially the Calvinists who profited from this development. They strengthened their position in the city government at all levels: in the magistracy, in the craft guilds, in the Broad Council, and in the leadership of the civic militia and the shooting companies. In March 1579, the Broad Council appointed a committee for the evaluation and—if necessary—adaptation of the religious peace.56 This adaptation materialized soon and, as often happened, was triggered by concrete events. On Ascension Day, 28 May 1579, the chapter of Our Lady organized a solemn general procession, attended by the Antwerp clergy and many Catholic citizens. Matthias of Austria and his retinue marched in the procession. Such processions were a vehicle par excellence to articulate Catholic presence in an urban space. Hence, it was no surprise that the Calvinists opposed such initiatives. The Antwerp magistracy thought it advisable that the procession make only the “small” tour around the church in stead of the “grand” tour through the city. When the procession began the grand tour nonetheless, Colonel Adam Verhult intervened with his soldiers. The resulting violence caused two deaths and many injuries. The participants in the procession, including Matthias of Austria, were forced to seek shelter in the church of Our Lady. William of Orange tried to pacify the explosive situation; he negotiated with the colonels and the captains of the civic militia and reached an agreement that Matthias and his councilors could leave the sanctuary of the church. Talks with the city magistracy led to the expulsion of some 150 Catholic clergymen.57 The next day, William of Orange convened the city government, including the representatives of the Broad Council as well as the colo-
56 SAA, Privilegekamer, 1658, fols. 326r°, 330r°–331r°, and Rijksarchief Antwerpen, Fonds Stad Antwerpen, 3, fols. 4–5 (deliberations in Broad Council, 20 and 22 March 1579). 57 For a detailed description of the incident, see J. P. Blaes and A. Henne (eds.), Mémoires anonymes sur les troubles des Pays-Bas 1565–1580, vol. 4 (Brussels: 1864), 126–129. See also an aviso from Antwerp, 3 June 1579, in: Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, Bestand 4, Abteilung f, Niederlande, 297, and Algemeen Rijksarchief Brussels, Papiers L.-P. Gachard, 698, fols. 210r°–211r°.
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nels and deans of the shooting companies. He greatly deplored what had happened and feared that it could cause altercations and violence in other towns. He therefore asked the members of the Broad Council to seek remedies that could alter the climate of strife and division.58 The arguments put forward in the Broad Council during the next few days reveal how things had changed since the proclamation of the provisional religious peace of August 1578. All members of the Broad Council agreed that a new religious peace was necessary, but their attitude towards the Catholic clergy had changed. The old aldermen were the most moderate. They emphasized that matters of religion could not be settled by violence. They mentioned the Latin expression “Concordia res parvae crescent”, “small things flourish thanks to unity”, which would become the motto of the young Dutch Republic.59 They added that now disorder and discord threatened to ruin the city and to bring back the slavery and tyranny of the Spaniards. A strict maintenance of the religious peace was the only remedy against all these threatening evils.60 The majority of the wardmasters (14 of 26) was more radical. They agreed that liberty should be guaranteed for all Christian religions, but they added that the Catholics should be content with 10 or 12 priests who could preach the Word of God and perform the ceremonies of their church. They believed that it was not necessary to suffer all the mendicant friars and the canons, who were nothing more than a burden for the common man.61 The deans of the craft guilds declared that the troubles of Ascension Day were unjust, since the war was conducted for the sake of liberty and freedom of conscience. The Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans should enjoy free exercise of their confession, according to the religious peace, but the Catholics should not be allowed to organize public processions or perform other public acts that could offend the Calvinists or Lutherans.62
58 Pieter Génard, “Verzameling getiteld: collegiale actenboeken 1577–83,” Antwerpsch Archievenblad 15 (no date): 399–401; SAA, Privilegekamer, 1658, fols. 397r°– 399v°. 59 The motto had its origins in the literature of the antiquity—it was, in fact, a quote from Sallust’s Jugurthine War. See Anton van der Lem, Verbeeldingen van vrijheid. Partijtekens en nationale symboliek in de eerste decennia van de Tachtigjarige Oorlog 1564–1584 (Utrecht: 2006). 60 SAA, Privilegekamer, 1658, fols. 402v°–406r° (29 May 1579). 61 Ibid., fols. 406v°–407v° (29 May 1579). 62 Ibid., fol. 410r° (29 May 1579).
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The decision-making process in the Broad Council led to a new religious peace, the so-called “eternal” peace of 12 June 1579, granted by the Antwerp city government and endorsed by William of Orange. The text contained an extensive introduction, which explained the central ideas behind the peace, and a set of concrete arrangements.63 The basic principle was that all Christians, whatever their confession, should live in peace and concord, complying with the ordinances of their civil authorities. Therefore, Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans— but not the Anabaptists—were allowed to organize public churches. The main ideas of the religious peace of 1578 were repeated, such as church buildings for all three religions, mutual respect, interdiction of malicious writings, songs, etc., and maintenance of traditional holy days. It also specified that all citizens were equal in civic matters. Public offices—such as posts in the city government—were open to all citizens, regardless their religion. The same applied to schooling and health care. When we look at the concrete points of the eternal peace of 1579 and compare it with the previous peace settlement, we see that the position of the Catholic Church was less favorable. The Catholics kept only three parish churches, including the main parish church of Our Lady. Furthermore, the eternal peace stipulated that the Calvinists and Lutherans could claim more space for worship if necessary. Secular priests were allowed to return to the city, but the majority of male regular religious received no such permission. Henceforth, all ecclesiastical persons were subject to taxes, and all public processions were forbidden. The peace established a committee, consisting of three persons of each religion, for the maintenance of the religious peace.64 Finally, the eternal peace announced a purely political arrangement: the entry of the city of Antwerp into the Union of Utrecht.65 The aim of the new peace settlement was, in fact, twofold: 1) To guarantee urban
63 See the text in SAA, Privilegekamer, 82, fols. 143r°–147r°, and Floris Prims (ed.), Register der Commissie tot onderhoud van de Religionsvrede te Antwerpen (1579–1581) (Brussels: 1954) 31–43. 64 For the activities of this committee, see Prims, Register der Commissie. 65 This entry was much debated in the Broad Council and particularly pushed by the committee of colonels. The formal signing of the treaty of the Union of Utrecht by the representatives of the Antwerp city government happened on 29 July 1579. S. Groenveld and H. L. Ph. Leeuwenberg, “Die originale unie metten acten daernaer gevolcht” in S. Groenveld and H. L. Ph. Leeuwenberg (eds.), De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking van een verbond en een verbondsacte (The Hague: 1979) 45.
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peace and order, which was a necessary precondition for the welfare of the Antwerp metropolis; 2) To unite forces in order to win the war against Spanish tyranny. Yet, it soon became clear that there was a gap between principles and reality. The process of political polarization continued—1579 was a crucial year in this process. The formation of two separate unions—the Catholic Union of Arras and the dominantly Calvinist Union of Utrecht—confirmed the growing division in the Low Countries. Furthermore, the peace conference at Cologne, which was an attempt to reconcile the rebellious provinces with the king of Spain, failed in 1579, mainly because the parties could not agree upon a religious settlement. As a consequence, Catholics were increasingly alienated from the Dutch Revolt, with many Catholic politicians shifting their support from the revolt to the king. As a result, the rebel party perceived the Catholics as unreliable. In the rebel towns, where a religious peace had been proclaimed, more and more pressure was put upon the Catholic Church.66 This is exactly what happened in Antwerp. The Catholics lost church buildings to the Calvinists and Lutherans, their clergy was put under stricter control, and more priests were expelled.67 In August 1579, the Broad Council appointed a committee for the disposal of Catholic ecclesiastical property. It consisted of six members—two from each confession recognized by the eternal religious peace. Initially, this committee focused on the property of the expelled mendicant orders, but later the property of other ecclesiastical institutions was also inventoried and confiscated. The revenue was used for the payment of Calvinist and Lutheran ministers and for the alimentation of apostate Catholic clergy.68 That a peaceful and stable coexistence of several religions was difficult to achieve in a period of increasing political and religious tensions also became clear on Sundays and holy days. The committee for
66
For the politico-religious polarization in 1579, see Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London: 1990), 194–197; Leon Van der Essen, “De Unies, 1578–1579” in J. A. Van Houtte et al. (eds.), Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol. 5 (Utrecht: 1952), 116–139; idem, “De scheuring in de Nederlanden 1579–1585” in J. A. Van Houtte et al., Algemene Geschiedenis, vol. 5, 140–152. 67 Prims, Register der Commissie, passim; Génard, “Verzameling getiteld,” Antwerpsch Archievenblad, 15 (s.d.): 15 and 16 (s.d.), passim; SAA, Privilegekamer, 657 (register with requests presented to the city magistracy 1579–1580, passim). 68 Prims, Register der Commissie, passim; SAA, Privilegekamer, 1656, fol. 58r° (proposition magistracy, 20 August 1579); SAA, Privilegekamer, 1657, fols. 29v°–30r°, 32v°, 34v°, 3r°, 435v°–44r° (opinion wardmasters and deans of the guilds, 13–23 April 1580); SAA, Privilegekamer, 1792, request and opinion colonels 13 April 1580.
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the maintenance of the religious peace asked priests and ministers to admonish their congregations not to work publicly or to open shops on these days. Infringements on this prescription caused public scandal and frictions between Catholics and Protestants.69 The Calvinist ministers responded that it was not appropriate to forbid work on other days than Sundays, because God commanded in Holy Scripture only to observe the seventh day of the week as a day of rest.70 The situation of the Catholic Church deteriorated from month to month, while, at the same time, the Calvinists consolidated their position in the city government. On 1 July 1581, the Antwerp city government finally prohibited the public exercise of the Catholic religion. The immediate motive for this proclamation was the capture of nearby Breda by Spanish troops,71 but it was, of course, also the result of a longer process of deterioration and exclusion. The city fathers granted the Catholics only two chapels, where they could celebrate their baptisms and marriages. For these rites, they were allowed to hire six priests who should take an oath of loyalty to the city government.72 These were small concessions to a religious community that still constituted the majority of the population. The so-called ‘eternal’ religious peace had lasted just two years. Yet, the ordinance of 1 July 1581 did not create a monopoly position for the Calvinist Church. The Lutherans retained their right of public worship and church-building. Nor did the antagonism between Calvinists and Lutherans disappear. The stain of political unreliability had never gone, and the rivalry between the confessions was still alive. The Calvinist Church leaders would have preferred, in fact, to exclude the Lutherans from the religious peaces proclaimed in 1578 and 1579,73 but this was a step too far for the Antwerp city fathers, who took into account the economic importance of the Lutheran community.
69
Prims, Register der Commissie, 108–109. Blaes and Henne, Mémoires anonymes, V, 144–145. 71 See the instructions for representatives of the Antwerp city government, 8 July 1581, in Rijksarchief Zeeland, Archief Jan van de Warck, 6. 72 The text of the prohibition in Jos Van den Nieuwenhuizen, Het beleg en de overgave van Antwerpen in 1585 (Antwerp: 1985), 17. 73 See, for instance, Jeremias Bastingius, Calvinist Minister at Antwerp, to the Consistory of Delft, 22 August 1578, in H. Q. Janssen (ed.), Bescheiden aangaande de kerkhervorming in Vlaanderen (Utrecht: 1877), 10, and Bernardino de Mendoza to Philip II, 8 September 1578, in Martin A. S. Hume (ed.), Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affair, Preserved Principally in the Archives of Simancas, vol. 2 (London: 1849), 613. 70
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The Catholic Monopoly Restored The Catholic community more than once protested its position, but no significant change occurred in the period of the Calvinist Republic. During the siege of Antwerp by Alexander Farnese and his Spanish army (August 1584–August 1585), the Antwerp Catholics found new courage. Yet, real change only materialized after the capitulation of the city. When in May 1585 attempts to break Farnese’s blockade failed, the city fathers realized that they would have to negotiate a capitulation with Farnese. Official discussion, endorsed by the Broad Council, started at the beginning of July.74 The Antwerp deputies, headed by Burgomaster Marnix of St Aldegonde, preferred a general peace treaty that would include the provinces of Holland and Zeeland. They hoped that such an accord might bring more generous conditions, particularly in religious issues. Farnese, however, was not prepared to consider a general peace agreement. He wanted to deal with the rebellious towns on an individual basis—a strategy that had already proven successful. In a memorandum, containing no less than 40 articles, the Antwerp negotiators asked that the king grant Calvinists and Lutherans some churches for the exercise of their religion and that he permit the burial of their deceased in public cemeteries (article 6).75 Yet, Farnese was not prepared to offer substantial concessions in matters of religion. The exclusive exercise of the Catholic religion, without the toleration of any other confession, was his starting point. He would grant Calvinists and Lutherans a term of three years only, during which they were allowed to live in the city without being troubled, provided that they caused no scandal. Within that three-year period, they had the choice of converting to Catholicism or emigrating from the city. The Antwerp negotiators tried in vain to push Farnese toward a more liberal agreement. The Spanish governor refused proposals for rights to carry out publicly baptisms, marriages, and burials. The final capitulation treaty, signed on 17 August 1585, granted the Calvinists and 74 See Guido Marnef, “Burgemeester in moeilijke tijden. Marnix en het beleg van Antwerpen” in Henk Duits and Ton van Strien (eds.), Een intellectuele activist. Studies over leven en werk van Philips van Marnix van Sint-Aldegonde (Hilversum: 2001), 28–36. 75 Articles of 23 July 1585 in L.-P. Gachard (ed.), “Documents concernant le siège d’ Anvers par le prince de Parme et la reconciliation de cette ville avec Philippe II,” Bulletin de la Commission royale d’Histoire 12 (1871), 241–254.
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Lutherans a period of tolerance of four in stead of three years. This was significantly more than Farnese had allowed in Ghent (two years), Brussels (two years), and Mechelen (seven months). For Marnix and the many Calvinists and Lutherans within Antwerp’s city walls it was undoubtedly little consolation.76 The treaty of 17 August ended Antwerp’s “Calvinist Republic”. Ten days later, Farnese made his triumphal entry in the city. For the next four years, the Calvinists and Lutherans enjoyed a de facto freedom of conscience. Farnese supervised the establishment of a new political regime, including a purge of the shooting companies and the civic militia. Strongly believing in the intrinsic power of the Counter-Reformation, he also took measures for the restoration of the Catholic Church. One of his aims was to convert as many Calvinists and Lutherans as possible during the four-year period of tolerance. By the time the reconciliation term expired in 1589, more than 1600 had converted to Catholicism. Some Calvinists had hoped to obtain an extension of the four-year period. They even collected money in order to “buy” such a concession from the central government, but the enterprise failed, partly due to the opposition of the Antwerp bishop. Many Calvinists and Lutherans decided to leave the city. Within four years, the population of Antwerp declined by nearly half, going from ca. 82,000 in 1585 to ca. 42,000 in 1589. The emigrants included some Catholics who left for economic reasons, but the majority were undoubtedly Calvinists and Lutherans who left to preserve their faiths.77 Conclusion The case of 16th-century Antwerp makes clear how difficult it was to build a multiconfessional society in an era of political and religious strife. The city fathers realized that increasing religious divisions jeopardized the interests of their “community of commerce”.78 Matthias 76
The reconciliation treaty of 17 August in ibid., 286–298; Marnef, “Burgemeester,” 34–35. 77 Guido Marnef, “Reconquering a rebellious city: Alessandro Farnese and the Siege and Recatholicization of Antwerp” in Hans Cools and Krista de Jonge (eds.), Alexander Farnese and the Low Countries (Turnhout: 2010); idem, “Protestant Conversions in an Age of Catholic Reformation: The Case of Sixteenth-Century Antwerp” in ArieJan Gelderblom et al. (eds.), The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs (Leiden: 2004), 37–42. 78 An M. Kint, “The Community of Commerce. Social Relationships in SixteenthCentury Antwerp” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1996), passim.
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of Austria agreed. When he addressed the Antwerp Broad Council after the incident on Ascension Day 1579, he argued that “the inhabitants ought to consider how beautiful, famous and prosperous the city of Antwerp is, and that its tranquility and prosperity depended on the freedom of all nations and that everyone should enjoy freedom of conscience without being suppressed in matters of religion”. The maintenance of the religious peace was a necessity.79 The accord of 2 September 1566 and the religious peaces of 1578 and 1579 were, in fact, attempts to find a solution for the changing religious environment. They created a legal framework that sanctioned the public exercise of the Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran confessions. Clergy and laity had to avoid any action that might cause discord, and they all had to submit to the civil authorities. The “eternal’ peace of 1579 even institutionalized the arrangement of multiconfessionalism. The committee for the maintenance of the religious peace included three members of each confession recognized by the peace. It followed the principle of “equality and equal number of office” among the three recognized confessions. Yet, this principle did not apply to the main political bodies that determined the decision-making process, such as the magistracy and the Broad Council. Furthermore, stable and enduring peace settlements were thwarted by the rapidly changing political context. The Spanish king or his loyal representatives in the Netherlands could revoke an arrangement allowing multior biconfessionalism once they had regained power, as happened in 1567 and 1585. On the other hand, the religious peace settlements could be adapted to the rapid Calvinist expansion, as happened in 1578 and 1579. In these years of politico-religious polarization, the Calvinist leaders considered the religious peaces as springboards for Calvinist dominance. They emphasized their claims by portraying the Catholics, especially the Catholic clergy, as supporters of the Spanish enemy. After the capitulation of the city in 1585, the champions of a triumphant Counter-Reformation policy started a similar process, this time casting the Calvinists as enemies. The Jesuit propaganda campaign fostered a Tridentine faith colored by the rejection and even diabolization of a heretical and rebellious “other”.80 In such a climate, experiments of multiconfessionalism belonged to a distant past.
79
Address of 1 June 1579, in: Rijksarchief Antwerp, Fonds Stad Antwerpen, 3, fol.
28. 80
Marnef, “Protestant conversions,” 42–45.
“IN EQUALITY AND ENJOYING THE SAME FAVOR”: BICONFESSIONALISM IN THE LOW COUNTRIES Benjamin J. Kaplan Such is the nature of our government that even the Papists, who on account of the common cause have embraced our side, are faithful to us by virtue of solemn promises. For that reason we ought also to have permitted the public exercise of Papist Religion, were it not that the priests and monks, our sworn enemies, had endeavoured to incite them to sedition. Indeed we even tolerate the Anabaptists themselves, being convinced that [knowledge of] the true religion is a gift of God. . . . Ecclesiastical Ordinances Drafted by Order of the States of Holland, 15761
In the wake of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, when Europe’s Christians struggled with the consequences of their new religious divisions, those who ruled over religiously mixed populations discovered that there were two ways to accommodate multiple churches in a single state. One was for them to acknowledge publicly and officially that their subjects—and perhaps they themselves, as a governing elite— were divided by faith into rival ecclesiastical establishments. But in an age when separation of church and state was almost inconceivable, that meant that rulers who viewed themselves as “Christian magistrates,” responsible for promoting piety and the “true faith,” had to authorize, protect, and possibly give governmental support to forms of Christianity which they deemed erroneous, pernicious, or even satanic. They also had to find mechanisms for containing the religious enmities that would set some of their subjects inevitably against one another, and possibly against them. The other approach was for rulers to establish a single official church but unofficially to tolerate dissent so long as it stayed discreetly out of sight, out of the public sphere. In that case, rulers could maintain a pretense, or fiction, that they and their subjects remained religiously united. They could avoid strife and secure the material benefits that often came from accepting religious diversity, even while salving their consciences and preserving the 1 Alastair Duke, “Select documents for the Reformation and the Revolt of the Low Countries, 1555–1609,” http://dutchrevolt.leidenuniv.nl/English/default.htm [accessed 24 Sept 2009], #34, “Justification.”
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sacred foundation of their state. So stated, it is no wonder that rulers usually found the second approach more palatable than the first. Of course, both approaches had variants, and aspects of the two could be combined with one another. But basically the alternatives were de jure official toleration, which historians call “bi-” or “multiconfessionalism,” depending on the number of churches sanctioned; or de facto toleration by connivance.2 The Dutch Republic was the supreme example in early modern Europe of the latter. Founded during the revolt against Spain, it was officially a Reformed (Calvinist) polity and by its laws, most importantly the Union of Utrecht (1579), it granted non-Calvinists only the limited right of freedom of conscience.3 That meant that people did not have to belong to the Reformed Church or attend its services, and that in the privacy of their homes they and their families could believe as they pleased and engage in any sort of domestic devotions. On this basis, Catholics, Mennonites, and a variety of other native religious dissenters were able in practice, with the tacit complicity of magistrates and fellow citizens, to form congregations and operate the quasi-clandestine churches known today as schuilkerken—hundreds of them. These churches, which looked from the outside like ordinary houses, barns, or warehouses, were the most important mechanism by which religious diversity was accommodated in Dutch society.4 Historians tend to forget, however, that the schuilkerk was by no means the only such mechanism, and that the Republic’s reputation for toleration did not rest on them alone. Perhaps most remarkably, in the southeastern enclaves of Maastricht, the Lands of Overmaas, and Upper Gelderland, cut off from the rest of the Republic by foreign territory (Map 1), Catholics as well as Calvinists worshiped completely openly. In these three areas, conquered by stadholder Frederick Hendrik in 1632, Dutch authorities granted de jure official toleration to Roman Catholicism. But if Frederik Hendrik or his father William of Orange had had their way, these would not have been the only biconfessional parts of the Dutch Republic. Beginning in the 16th cen2 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2007), chs. 6–8. 3 S. Groenveld and H. L. Ph. Leeuwenberg (eds.), De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking van een verbond en een verbondsacte (The Hague: 1979), article 13, 34–5. 4 Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 1031–64.
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tury, it was repeatedly proposed, suggested, or feared that the Dutch might adopt a biconfessional arrangement for Calvinists and Catholics, their two largest religious groups, and the two that were most at odds. Models were not far to seek: both to the south and east, the Low Countries were flanked by biconfessional neighbours. Arguments were made that biconfessionalism had advantages over granting dissenters mere freedom of conscience. Yet in practice, only parts of the Low Countries ever adopted such an arrangement, and only for brief periods, with the sole exception of those small southeastern enclaves, where biconfessionalism lasted, with just one notable interruption, to the very end of the Republic. What follows, then, is a story less of what was than of what might have been—of a possibility people were keenly aware of, but that time and again failed or was rejected. * * * At the beginning of the Revolt, when the Habsburg Philip II still ruled all 17 provinces of the northern and southern Netherlands, it was the spread of Calvinism that posed most urgently the question whether more than one religion could be tolerated, and if so, how. Severe placards issued by Philip and his father Charles V made any form of Protestant belief or worship punishable by death. And yet, after years of fermentation underground, in 1566 tens of thousands of Netherlanders evinced publicly their sympathy for the new faith by attending outdoor “hedge sermons” by Protestant preachers. A great wave of iconoclasm, perpetrated by far smaller groups, followed. In its wake, to avoid further unrest, officials struck local accords with Protestants which, in some cases, granted the latter provisionally the right not only to continue their hedge sermons on the same sites they had previously used, as Philip’s regent Margaret of Parma had reluctantly conceded, but to conduct their services within city walls. In some cities, such as Utrecht and Nijmegen, Protestants were permitted to use one of the church buildings they had attacked and “purified” during their iconoclastic riots. In the metropolis of Antwerp, economic hub of the Low Countries, William of Orange negotiated an accord with Calvinist and Lutheran leaders, organizing a special militia to enforce the agreement and keep the peace.5
5 Pieter Bor, Oorsprongk, begin, en vervolgh der Nederlandsche oorlogen, beroerten, en borgerlyke oneenigheden, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: 1679–84), 96–112, quotation on 99;
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Margaret quickly voided those accords that overstepped the bounds she had set, but several months passed before it became clear that her half-brother repudiated all of them. In that interval, in November 1566, William of Orange distilled his views into a Memorandum on the critical state of the Low Countries and the means to cure them. In it, he urged that the Netherlands learn from the tragic experience of its neighbors France and the Holy Roman Empire. Holding out as a negative example the religious wars that had afflicted both lands, he pleaded for the Netherlands to avoid futile suffering and devastation by adopting promptly and willingly the same remedy that the French and Germans had eventually been forced to accept under duress: . . . seeing our poor country so ill and on the brink of destruction, it seems to me that we must look around us and see what remedy our neighbors, who have been struck by the same evil, have employed; for, having tried all the means in the world to avoid the exercise of another religion, they have in the end been compelled by force . . . to permit it . . . .
In a list of possible solutions, Orange threw his weight behind two: either permit non-Catholic worship and “prescribe in each province certain places for it,” or “leave it to the choice of each city, lord, or gentleman holding powers of high justice.” Himself a German prince with a network of allies and clients in the Empire, Orange felt it would be especially fitting if the Netherlands, until recently a part of the Empire, “conformed” in this regard “to its institutions.” 6 One possible solution Orange notably rejected: granting Protestants mere freedom of conscience. This, he thought, would leave them unsatisfied and so was a recipe for disloyalty and unrest—an argument which, mutatis mutandis, would be made decades later concerning Catholics. Moreover, it would be the true way . . . to nourish in these lands all the sects and heresies of the world, [and to] cast the rest into an atheism that could
P. J. H. Ubachs, “De Nederlandse religievrede van 1578,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis 77 (1997): 44. 6 William of Orange, “Mémoire sur l’état critique des Pays-Bas et les moyens d’y porter remède,” http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/groe009arch02_01/groe009arch02_01_0124 .htm [accessed 6 Aug 2009]; Elisabeth Marieke Geevers, “Gevallen vazallen: de integratie van Oranje, Egmont en Horn in de Spaans-Habsburgse monarchie (1559–1567)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Amsterdam, 2008). In an alternate version of the Mémoire (same reference), Orange also subscribed to permitting only the Augsburg Confession (as in the Empire), or only the Augsburg Confession and that of Calvin, in addition to the Catholic religion.
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only cause disobedience without any respect, for one knows that those who think badly of the Catholic religion would never want to have anything to do with our churches, and all those people would die like brute beasts. . . .
Freedom of conscience, in other words, had two grave disadvantages. First, to grant it to everyone was to open the door to an unlimited variety of faiths, some of them far more noxious than Calvinism. Negative judgment aside, this was an astute prediction, for in the 17th century the Republic would have no equal in Europe in the number and diversity of its religious groups. Second, Orange argued, faith alone was not enough: without worship and a church, people were as good as without religion altogether.7 Earlier in the same year, Franciscus Junius, minister to Antwerp’s Calvinists, had made precisely the same points in A brief discourse sent to King Philip. Without the public worship, ceremonies, and moral lessons provided by a church, people would fall into atheism and libertinism: “people must be kept under the outward discipline of some religion, whatever it may be, whether good or bad,” and so the best course was for Philip to countenance the Reformed Church, with its robust system of ecclesiastical discipline, alongside the Catholic and to require everyone to belong to one or the other. In effect, Junius was proposing an alliance of Catholics and Calvinists against the licentiousness he associated with spiritualist sects such as the Family of Love. The magistrates of Leiden, when in January 1567 they struck an accord with local Calvinists, justified themselves in similar terms, claiming their purpose was to hinder “all other reprobated sects and heresies,” including the Anabaptists.8 These arguments had no purchase on Philip II, who sent the Duke of Alva to extirpate everything he regarded as heresy, which most definitely included Calvinism. Only in 1572, after some cities in Holland and Zeeland renewed the revolt by admitting the Sea Beggars and proclaiming William of Orange their leader, did the issue of toleration arise again. Orange once again favored full rights of worship for both Calvinists and Catholics. At the first “free” assembly of the States of Holland in July, his representative Philip van Marnix, Lord of St. Aldegonde, declared that his master’s intention was “that freedom 7
Orange, “Mémoire.” Franciscus Junius, “A brief discourse sent to King Philip, our prince and sovereign lord . . . ,” http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/koss002text01_01/koss002text01_01_0004 .htm [accessed 6 August 2009]; Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 1:107. 8
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of religion would be maintained, both for the Reformed and the Roman [Catholics], and that everyone in his own, in public and in churches or chapels, however the authorities find it most suitable to ordain, would have free exercise of the same.”9 Orange instructed his commanders accordingly; local agreements were struck similar to those in 1566; and on several occasions, Orange leapt to the defense of Catholic worship, standing up to the most militant of his own supporters. His efforts were to no avail. Beggar troops attacked Catholic churches in Haarlem, Leiden, Gouda, and Dordrecht, among other cities. Further disturbances were forestalled only by closing Catholic churches. The desperate situation in which the rebels found themselves made them prone to war hysteria, ready to accept as true any rumor of sedition. Catholics as a group could not escape the suspicion that they supported Philip II, champion of their faith, against a rebel coalition dominated by Protestants. Though the dating is uncertain, around April 1573 the States of Holland bowed to pressure and banned Catholic worship.10 Five years later, Orange tried again, making the most serious and ambitious effort in the history of the Low Countries to introduce biconfessionalism: the official, de jure authorizing of Calvinism and Catholicism, with both faiths to be exercised publicly and equal “civil” rights for their adherents. Why Orange strived so hard to this end has been a subject of much commentary and judgment by historians, who tend to posit that he was motivated either by a principled belief in religious freedom or by a pragmatic, political need to keep Catholics and Calvinists fighting together against Spain, not against one another. The debate is a sterile one because the two alternatives were anything but mutually exclusive; Orange’s values and interests wholly coincided.11 One can say, though, that the driving motivation behind his effort was, as in 1572, the urgent need to maintain the rebel coalition of Calvinists and Catholics. This time, though, the coalition he was desperately trying to hold together extended across all 17 Netherland-
9
Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 1:389. Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 1:380–93; Duke, “Select documents,” #26; Alastair C. Duke, Reformation and revolt in the Low Countries (London: 1990), 203–9; H. A. Enno van Gelder, Revolutionnaire reformatie. De vestiging van de Gereformeerde Kerk in de Nederlandse gewesten, gedurende de eerste jaren van de Opstand tegen Filips II, 1575–1585 (Amsterdam: 1943), 17–33; James D. Tracy, The Founding of the Dutch Republic: War, Finance, and Politics in Holland, 1572–1588 (Oxford: 2008), 81, 118. 11 For an overview of the debate, see Ubachs, “Nederlandse religievrede,” 42–3, who denies that the religievrede was an expression of religious tolerance. 10
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ish provinces, which by the Pacification of Ghent (1576) had agreed to fight together to force “the Spanish” to depart. Thus it included, at one end of the spectrum, Holland and Zeeland, where Calvinism was now the official, public faith; at the other end, the Walloon provinces, chiefly Artois and Hainaut, where Protestantism had never gained a firm foothold and elites, especially the nobility, were determined to thwart its spread; while in the middle, internally divided, stood most of the other provinces, foremost among them Flanders and Brabant, from which thousands of Protestants had fled into exile. Under the terms of the Pacification, all the provinces had agreed to a suspension of the heresy edicts, but nothing more. This was utterly insufficient to satisfy either the refugees who now flooded back to their homes, or the other members of the Reformed congregations that quickly formed. The events that ensued in 1577–79 were complex and varied greatly by locale. Overall, though, a general dynamic can be observed in those middle provinces, as well as in Amsterdam and Haarlem, which like the former had previously been occupied by Spanish troops and only joined the Revolt with the Pacification. Where the urgings of Orange did not suffice, popular agitation, including violent attacks on Catholic clergy and institutions, forced city governments, still dominated by Catholics, to grant Calvinists some limited freedom of worship. Calvinists took this as merely a stepping stone toward the eventual triumph of their faith and suppression of Catholicism. Alarmed Catholics took it as precisely the same. Every success the Calvinists booked encouraged further their militancy, and in a whole string of cities, including Antwerp, they seized control of the government, either legally or by force. In Ghent, where a tradition of guild militancy added an edge of social radicalism to their movement, Calvinists established a theocratic regime that set about exporting Calvinist revolution far and wide across Flanders. Alienated and angry, the Walloons abandoned the rebel coalition, making peace with Spain.12 The “religious peace” proposed by Orange in the summer of 1578 was intended to arrest this dynamic at its midpoint by establishing a stable balance between Calvinist and Catholic parties. The term itself, “religious peace” (Religion-frid in the original, translated usually as 12
General accounts in English include Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Ithaca: 1977), 187–98; Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford: 1995), 184–205; K. W. Swart, William of Orange and the Revolt of the Netherlands, 1572–84 (Abingdon: 2003), chs. 2–3.
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religievrede) was a German import, and in proposing it to the States General, Orange explained that by it he meant “the freedom of religions with their exercise, as in Germany and other kingdoms.”13 The most extensive argument on its behalf was made by the Reformed Synod of South Holland, which Orange, through his court chaplain Villiers, mobilized after the States General gave his proposal a cool reception. In requesting full freedom of worship for the Reformed, the synod marshalled an impressively long list of precedents to prove that it was not true, as some claimed, “that two religions cannot exist together in one land.” They noted Roman emperors who had permitted both pagan and Christian worship. In discussing the standard examples of France and Germany, the synod pointed out (not entirely accurately) that in cities such as Frankfurt, Worms, Ulm, and Augsburg, Protestant and Catholic religions were both practiced “without disunity or tumult . . . Indeed, in some cities, even in one church.” The synod went on to cite the further contemporary examples of Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland; the Ottoman Empire and Morocco; and, like a trump card, the Papal States, where the pope himself allowed Jews to have “their public synagogues or schools.” Surely Protestants, as fellow Christians who “desire only a reformation and correction” of God’s church, deserved at least as much. All in all, the synod argued, experience suggests that “one could much rather and more certainly say that all who have wished to suppress one of the two religions have put their state or government in great peril and danger.” To which consideration the synod added also the threat, cited in 1566, that without a proper church would-be Protestants might fall into “an epicurean, godless existence.”14 Drafted in the Council of State, published in the name of the Archduke Matthias, Governor-General of the Low Countries, and sent by the States General to the individual provinces for their consideration, the religious peace of 1578 was intended for implementation across the Low Countries. For the sake of “the common Fatherland,” the peace was to remain in force until it “shall please God . . . by 13 R. H. Bremmer, “De nationale betekenis van de Synode van Dordrecht (1578)” in D. Nauta and J. P. van Dooren (eds.), De nationale synode van Dordrecht 1578: gerformeerden uit de Noordelijke en Zuidelijke Nederlanden bijeen (Amsterdam: 1978), 112. 14 A. C. de Schrevel (ed.), Recueil de documents relatifs aux troubles religieux en Flandre, 1577–1584 (Bruges: 1921), 1:460–71; see also Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 1:968–71.
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means of a good, holy and free, general, or at least national, council, to resolve the conflicting opinions which we see in these lands concerning the matter of religion.” When such a council might be convened or how it might resolve the differences, except perhaps by an agreement similar to the religievrede itself, was never clear. But in the interim, for an indefinite period, Calvinists were to be allowed to worship publicly in any large community where they (excluding those resident for less than a year) numbered over 100 households and in smaller communities wherever they (with the same exclusion) formed a majority of the population. In Holland and Zeeland, where the shoe was on the other foot, the same provisions were to apply to Catholics, whose religion was to be “reestablished.” Universities, schools, hospitals, charitable foundations, and similar institutions were to make no distinction between members of the two groups, who were to be equally eligible for government offices and public posts. Protestants were to observe some of “the laws and customs of the Catholic church regarding marriage.” Outside Holland and Zeeland, they were also to observe Catholic holy days and prohibitions on the sale and eating of meat. Numerous clauses were designed to avoid future conflicts. Sites of Catholic and Reformed worship were to be located as far apart from one another as possible. Preachers were to avoid saying anything “tending toward riot or sedition”; soldiers were to wear no contentious “marks or signs on the body”; people were not to compose, sell, or sing “any scornful or injurious songs, ballads, refrains or other libels or defamatory writings.” In each city, a commission composed of two Protestant and two Catholic members was to be established to investigate infractions of the peace and report them to the magistrates.15 The proposal met with a very mixed reception in the provinces. It was rejected out of hand by the States of Artois and Hainaut as contrary to the Pacification. In the States of Holland it was defeated by a majority of votes, though a local peace instituted by Orange in Haarlem in 1577 continued until 1581.16 On the provincial level, only the States of Friesland and the Ommelanden of Groningen formally accepted the proposal. But in Antwerp, the civic militia succeeded in pressing magistrates to agree to a provisional accord modelled on the wider
15
Schrevel, Recueil, 448–59, 492–503. Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie. Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577–1620 (’s-Gravenhage: 1989), ch. 2. 16
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one. Other cities followed suit, adopting local versions of Orange’s religious peace.17 Floris Thin, Advocate of the States of Utrecht and an ally of Orange’s, penned in the summer of 1578 a first draft of what became the Union of Utrecht, in which he proposed that all members adopt the religious peace. But the final version, signed in January 1579, left Holland and Zeeland as officially Reformed provinces and gave other member-provinces carte blanche either to adopt the religious peace or to regulate religious affairs as they pleased, so long as they respected individual freedom of conscience. Catholics in Holland and Zeeland, then, would not get freedom of worship as a quid pro quo in exchange for the expansion of Protestantism elsewhere. Many people regarded the Union, accordingly, as anti-Catholic. Orange declared it “worthless” and continued for several months to hope that the States General might approve another union based on his religious peace. In May he gave up and signed the existing document.18 All in all, some 27 cities adopted some version of Orange’s religious peace for a shorter or longer period between 1578 and 1581.19 Neither in Haarlem, Antwerp, Utrecht, nor elsewhere, though, did such local accords check Protestant militancy or halt the accelerating trend toward polarization along religious lines. Even while the accords lasted the terms of some of them had to be renegotiated after violent clashes. Most of the accords still functioning as of March 1580 fell victim to the anti-Catholic backlash that followed the decision of the Catholic George de Lalaing, Count of Rennenberg to abandon the revolt and return, with the provinces of which he was stadholder (Friesland, Groningen, Overijssel, and Drenthe), to Spanish obedience. Across large parts of the Low Countries, Catholic churches suffered iconoclasm, Catholic clergy were expelled, and placards were issued outlawing the
17 Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, 1:974–5, 990–96; Geeraert Brandt, The History of the Reformation and Other Ecclesiasticalal Transactions in, and about, the LowCountries . . . , trans. John Chamberlayne, vol. 1 (London: 1720–23), 344–49; Swart, William of Orange, 153–60; Israel, Dutch Republic, 194–5, 203; Tracy, Founding of the Dutch Republic, 157, 164; R. H. Bremmer, Reformatie en rebellie: Willem van Oranje, de calvinisten en het recht van opstand. Tien onstuimige jaren: 1572–1581 (Franeker: 1984), 166–8. 18 J. J. Woltjer, “De wisselende gestalten van de Unie” in S. Groenveld and H. L. Ph. Leeuwenberg (eds.), De Unie van Utrecht. Wording en werking van een verbond en een verbondsacte (The Hague: 1979), 88–100; Bremmer, Reformatie en rebellie, 150; Swart, William of Orange, 159–60; Jan den Tex, Oldenbarnevelt, trans. R. B. Powell (Cambridge: 1973), 17–19; Tracy, Founding of the Dutch Republic, 143. 19 Ubachs, “Nederlandse religievrede,” 55.
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mass. By 1581, Catholicism was banned in all those provinces and cities still in revolt.20 However complete, the defeat of Orange’s religievrede did not constitute, any more than the similar turn of events in Holland earlier, a decisive “rejection of toleration,” as Jonathan Israel has claimed.21 It did mean, though, that one form of toleration, de jure biconfessionalism, had been rejected in favor of another, de facto connivance. From the moment of its constitutional birth, with the abjuration of Philip’s sovereignty in 1581, the Dutch Republic was a Reformed polity. Until the Synod of Dort in 1618–19, the character of that Reformed religion may have been disputed, and full confirmation may not have come until the end of the Eighty-Years’ War, at the Great Assembly of 1651. From as early as the 1580s, though, there was little ambiguity about the identification of the Dutch state as Reformed. In 1647, pious Zeelanders would even call the Reformed faith “the fundament upon which this flourishing republic is based, and the principal, indeed only bond by which the various provinces remain united with one another in any common state government.”22 The edge of anxiety that can be heard in the Zeelanders’ declaration is as telling, however, as the declaration itself. Issued in the context of peace negotiations with Spain, the declaration formed part of an extended argument why the Republic should not “permit anywhere, wherever and under whatever pretext it may be, the public exercise of the Roman superstitions.”23 In 1608, Philip III had made freedom of worship for Dutch Catholics one of the conditions for making peace and recognizing the United Provinces as a sovereign, independent land. The Dutch had rejected such a concession out of hand, and the two parties had ended up concluding only a 12-years’ truce. Like a ghost that could not be laid to rest peacefully, though, the possibility that the Republic might yet grant formal freedom of worship to Catholics, at least in some regions, continued 40 years later to haunt pious Calvinists.
20
See note 12; for details see Bor, Nederlandsche oorlogen, vol. 2. Israel, Dutch Republic, 372. 22 Lieuwe van Aitzema, Verhael, van de Nederlandtsche vreedehandeling, vol. 2 (The Hague: 1650), 263–4. 23 Aitzema, Vreedehandeling, 2:265. 21
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* * * Despite the defection of the Walloon provinces in 1579, the military victories of the Duke of Parma in the 1580s, and the return of all the southern provinces to Spanish obedience, northern Netherlanders continued for many decades to hope that the south might still be won over to the anti-Spanish cause and rejoin the north in revolt. They dreamed of a Low Countries reunited under a revived Pacification of Ghent. Given, however, that the south had in the interim been effectively recatholicized, it was clear to the political leaders of the Republic that any hope of realizing these dreams depended on their willingness to accommodate the southerners’ Catholic faith. They understood too that southerners would offer no sympathy or support for military campaigns launched in their direction if they viewed the Dutch not as political liberators but as religious oppressors. Thus, in 1602, before ordering their army on an offensive, the States General issued an open letter to the “prelates, princes, counts, lords, nobles and cities of Brabant, Flanders, Artois” and the other southern provinces. Urging them, for the sake of their freedoms, to support the Dutch war effort, the States General assured them that if they did, they could so order their religious affairs as they found best, and that “nothing shall be done or undertaken by us” against their religion. Such generosity, though, was conditional on the southerners’ forsaking the Spanish voluntarily. After the Dutch army reduced the city of Grave, its commander Prince Maurits felt no obligation to make any special concession to the city’s Catholics, who would be treated “without investigation, in all fairness in this matter just like other inhabitants of these United Netherlands.”24 In 1629, Den Bosch, one of the four “capital cities” of Brabant, was taken by siege, one of the greatest Dutch victories in the Eighty-Years’ War. In negotiating the terms of its eventual surrender, its magistrates tried to obtain guarantees for Catholic clergy, institutions, and worship. Stadholder Frederik Hendrik, youngest son of William of Orange, may have been inclined to grant their request, but was not
24 Cornelis Cau et al. (eds.), Groot placaet-boeck, Inhoudende de placaten ende ordonnantiën ende edicten van de Doorluchtige Hooghmogende Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenighde Nederlanden, ende vande Edele Groot Mogende Heeren Staten van Hollandt ende West-Vrieslandt, mitsgaders van de Edel Mogende Heeren Staten van Zeelandt, vol. 2 (The Hague: 1658–1797), 9–14, 601–6 (quotes on 9, 12, 602).
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in a strong enough position politically to buck Calvinist opposition.25 Den Bosch, until then the seat of a Catholic bishop (Ophovius) with whom Frederik Hendrik had friendly relations, was Protestantized, at least in the official, institutional sense: a majority of its inhabitants always remained Catholic. The surrounding bailiwick (Meierij) of Den Bosch remained for almost 20 years in extreme turmoil, religiously as well as politically, as Dutch and Spanish forces continued to contest it. During this “time of reprisals,” each side attempted to suppress the other’s religion and expel its clergy, but neither side had the means to do so entirely. The stadholder and the bishop would have preferred to tolerate both pastors and dominees rather than see, as they did, both persecuted. This miserable spectacle did no good for the reputation of the Dutch in the south.26 1632 saw Frederik Hendrik lead the Dutch army on another offensive campaign, this time up the river Maas, and this time the States General decided in advance, though initially they kept their decision secret, “to proceed on the model of 1602.” The first cities to fall were Venlo and Roermond, in Upper Gelderland. Neither offered great resistance to Frederik Hendrik’s overwhelming force, and though neither surrendered voluntarily, the stadholder treated them as if they had. Under the terms of their capitulations, Catholic institutions and clergy were protected and Catholic worship continued as before, with the requirement only that one church be vacated for use by the Reformed. Even the bishop of Roermond could remain and continue in function. Penetrating further, the Dutch army took Sittard, Straelen, the major strategic prize of Maastricht, and then the city and duchy of Limburg. In all these places, it was declared, public Reformed worship would be introduced, but Catholicism would otherwise be left intact. At this juncture, the States General published an open call for the southerners to rise up, guaranteeing explicitly that whoever did so would retain not only their “privileges, freedoms and rights” but also “the public exercise of the Roman Catholic religion.”27 The door
25 J. J. Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, Prins van Oranje: een biografisch drieluik (Zutphen: 1978), 291–4; W. A. J. Munier, Het simultaneum in de landen van Overmaas. Een uniek instituut in de Nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis (1632–1878), (Leeuwarden: 1998), 9. 26 V. A. M. Beermann, Stad en Meierij van ’s-Hertogenbosch van 1629 tot 1648. Een episode uit het laatste stadium van den Tachtigjarigen Oorlog (Nijmegen: 1940), 127–51; Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, 284, 295, 303–5. 27 Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, 375–89 (quotation on 376); Cau, Groot placaetboeck, 2:13–18, 621–4, 647–53 (quotation on 16).
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to Brabant, Flanders, and other provinces seemed open. In the event, the Dutch offensive got no further, and within a few years the Dutch had yielded back to the Spanish some of their recent conquests. In the territories they retained, though, Dutch authorities kept their word, making no attempt to suppress Catholicism. A quest for allies and supporters, then, had induced the Dutch to promise far-reaching concessions to Catholics in southern territories. These concessions, which Catholics in the seven northern provinces could only envy, won them few friends among their fellow Netherlanders. By making similar promises, though, the Dutch also hoped to secure the friendship and appease the sensibilities of another, more powerful ally: France. French diplomats served as mediators, along with English ones, in the truce negotiations of 1608–09, and, as representatives of a Catholic monarch (the convert Henry IV), they had instructions to do what they could to improve the situation of Dutch Catholics. Obviously, if they pushed too hard on this point, they would lose their neutrality and with it their ability to mediate between the Dutch and the Spanish. They did, though, manage to extract from the former one concession. Not to the Spanish and not in writing, but in a verbal pledge the States General and Prince Maurits promised “on their honor . . . that no religious innovation would be introduced” in the villages of Brabant that, in the course of the war, had fallen under their sway. In the countryside around Breda, Bergen-op-Zoom, and Grave, then, Catholicism would continue “on the same footing” as always, as the sole permitted religion.28 Perceiving that the Dutch would yield no further, the
28 Emanuel van Meteren, Historie van de oorlogen en geschiedenissen der Nederlanderen en der zelver naburen, vol. 10 (Gorinchem: 1748–63), quotation on 114–15; W. J. M. van Eysinga, De wording van het twaalfjarig bestand van 9 april 1609 (Amsterdam: 1959), 114–26, 148–53. The Dutch honored this agreement through the period of the truce, and even after 1621 Catholicism was scarcely hindered in the region. In the negotiations that led to the Peace of Westphalia, the Spanish demanded that Catholics in the region, and throughout States-Brabant, be allowed to retain permanently their churches, clergy, and ecclesiastical property. The arguments of the States of Zeeland cited earlier aimed to forestall any such concession, which Calvinists feared would have a domino-effect, opening the door to freedom of worship for Catholics in other parts of the Republic. The Dutch rejected the demand, and after the region was definitively ceded to the Republic in 1648, Catholicism there was made illegal. Peter Toebak, “Het kerkelijk-godsdienstige en cultuerele leven binnen het noordwestelijke deel van het hertogdom Brabant (1587–1609): een typering,” Trajecta 1 (1992): 124–43; Charles de Mooij, Geloof kan Bergen verzetten. Reformatie en katholieke herleving te Bergen op Zoom 1577–1795 (Hilversum: 1998), 283–6; Cau, Groot placaet-boeck, 2:267–70.
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French diplomats, led by the jurist Pierre Jeannin, decided to plead the case of their co-religionists more broadly only after the negotiations finished. Then, in a spirited address to the States General, Jeannin argued that Dutch Catholics had proven their loyalty to the Dutch state in wartime, had contributed to its victory, and now deserved to share in the fruits of peace. State security may previously have justified severe measures restricting Catholic worship, but in a time of peace there was no need for such. Jeannin’s own king had granted legal toleration (in 1598) to those who shared the same faith as the Dutch; the latter should do the same reciprocally for Catholics. The experience of France proved that toleration was conducive to peace, and indeed that it was rather intolerance that undermined the loyalty of subjects, fomented factions, and threatened the unity of a state. In the Netherlands themselves the Catholic faith had been “received and authorized” in the early years of the revolt. As a gift of the Holy Spirit, faith could not be coerced, and those people who found their religion suppressed would either maintain it all the more stubbornly or “fall little by little into contempt for God and impiety.” For all these reasons and more, Jeannin concluded, Dutch authorities should grant Catholics “the free and public exercise of their religion.” Knowing, though, how little inclined the States General were to such a step, and knowing how much resistance and divisions the latter would give rise to, Jeannin, on behalf of his king, asked only that Dutch Catholics be allowed to worship in their homes “without being investigated there, and without the rigor of the placards previously issued . . . being exercised any longer against them.”29 Jeannin’s pleas fell mostly on deaf ears. Many Dutch authorities even made a point in 1609 of renewing the placards against Catholic worship, to ensure that Catholics understood that the truce had not expanded their freedoms. Not surprisingly, many Catholics felt betrayed by the Spanish as well as Dutch. In one pamphlet presenting a fictive dialogue, a Catholic lauds the truce as a good thing generally— defends it even against a Calvinist’s suspicions—but complains of one point that “greatly displeases him, yea gnaws him to the bone, [and] makes his flesh and blood wither . . . . that we have been granted, alas, neither church nor chapel nor even a wretched little cell to consecrate
29 J. A. C. Buchon, Choix de chroniques et mémoires sur l’Histoire de France avec notices littéraires. Négociations du Président Jeannin (Paris: 1838), 692–5.
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the holy mass . . .” When his interlocutor points out that a Calvinist would be executed for treason if he proclaimed the “Word of God” publicly in the lands of the king or archdukes, the Catholic grants that he and his co-religionists have “no complaints” as long as they are left in peace to worship in their homes; then they can be counted on as loyal, “good patriots.”30 In practice, Catholics found that many local authorities did grow more relaxed, and that, during the period of the truce, they could worship in private with less fear of raids and prosecution than before. Ironically, it was the French friend not the Spanish foe who continued in subsequent years to exert religious pressure on the Dutch.31 French clout was demonstrated in 1635 when the Republic and France concluded a treaty of alliance. Its object in the first instance was the southern provinces, which, if France went to war with Spain, it was agreed the French and Dutch would jointly invade. The southerners would be invited once again to rebel, which if they did, the treaty envisioned their becoming “a league of independent cantons, on the model of Switzerland”; if they did not, their lands would be partitioned between France and the Republic. A key provision of the treaty held that the Roman Catholic religion would be preserved “in its entirety” in the territories incorporated into the Dutch state, with Catholic clergy enjoying “the same liberty, authority, and prerogative” as they enjoyed currently.32 Richelieu assured the Dutch negotiators it was not his intention to exclude the Reformed faith entirely from the territories in question, suggesting that France would not object if Reformed persons worshipped privately, but in the text of the treaty the Reformed received no rights at all. Voicing the vehement opposition of many Calvinists, a minister declared flatly to Frederik Hendrik “that it would be better not to have the city of Antwerp than to win and hold it with admittance of the Roman [Catholic] religion.” But Frederik Hendrik
30 Willem Jansz Yselveer, Dialogvs ofte tvve-spraec in rym ghestelt tusschen twee personagien ghenaemt ghereformeert patriot ende roomsch catholijck. Vervatende in’t corte den handel vande tvvaelf-jarighen treves, Knuttel/TEMPO no. 1625 (N.p., 1609), B iii v(o). 31 In 1629, for example, Louis XIII wrote the States of Holland on behalf of the Catholics of Den Bosch, requesting freedom of worship for them and for Catholics throughout the Republic. A. M. Frenken, “De Bossche Bisschop Michaël Ophovius O.P. 1570–1637,” Bossche Bijdragen 14 (1936): 84, 154–5. 32 Israel, Dutch Republic, 527; Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, 431.
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did not share this view, nor did he see the terms of the treaty as a departure from precedent: He had seen a similar basis adopted in the year 1602; it was merely a granting of permission [toelatinghe] for the Roman [Catholic] religion, without which the king of France could never be induced to [conclude] the treaty . . . . In the East Indies we permitted the heathen idolatry and icons of the Chinese and of others living in places under our authority; the popish ceremonies weren’t as bad as them. We did right to promote our religion and its introduction; we could promote it, and ought to do so, where we are master, which would enable us to appoint the magistracy as we see fit. It would be better to introduce the [Reformed] religion where it is not, with permission for the Roman [Catholic], than simply to remain outside the places of our enemy. Alone we could not drive off the Spaniard; it was a great thing that the king of France offered us his hand in aid, and opened the door [for us] to introduce our religion . . . 33
In other words, an incremental expansion of the Reformed faith was better than none. Given the conditions set by the French, Frederik Hendrik—and, when it came down to it, a majority in the States General—were prepared to make even broader religious concessions than they had made three years earlier. With the help of France, they hoped to make good the disappointments of the Maas campaign. Naturally, France’s Most Christian King could not “without offending his conscience give the aid of his own forces for a conquest whereby the exercise of the Catholic religion would be destroyed.” So his ambassador declared in 1646 when once again the French and the Dutch were planning a joint military campaign. This time, Dutch negotiators promised only that if Antwerp fell to their army, the exercise of the Catholic religion would remain “free and public” in the city, adding in a secret article that Catholics would retain the use of a maximum of four churches. The plan, in other words, was for Antwerp to become biconfessional. Calvinists quickly disavowed it.34 From a Calvinist perspective, it was a mixed blessing that these territorial ambitions were never realized. On the one hand, it robbed them of the opportunity to attempt more widely in the south what they undertook first in the cities, and eventually throughout the States-held
33 Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, 434–5; Pieter Johan Blok, Frederik Hendrik, Prins van Oranje (Amsterdam: 1924), 164–7; Henri Lonchay, La rivalité de la France et de l’Espagne aux Pays-Bas, 1635–1700. Étude d’histoire diplomatique et militaire (Brussels: 1896), 68–9. 34 Aitzema, Vreedehandeling, 2:94–9 (quotations on 95, 98).
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parts of Brabant and Flanders: a political and ecclesiastical Reformation intended to replicate, in these overwhelmingly Catholic areas, the religious settlement that prevailed elsewhere in the Republic, with Catholicism reduced to an illegal faith tolerated only by connivance and practiced only privately. On the other hand, the conditions under which the Dutch were likely to gain control of the territories, in particular the terms set by the French, were likely to protect Catholicism and establish it as a lawful, or even monopoly, faith. In the process, the Republic would lose its character as a Calvinist state, not only by virtue of incorporating officially Catholic provinces but perhaps also, it was feared, through the undermining of Calvinist dominance in the north. One pamphleteer articulated this fear in a much-printed dialogue of 1646, in which a Catholic interlocutor challenges the conventional wisdom that peace with Spain was in the interest of Dutch Catholics. Agreeing rather with a Calvinist in demanding that war continue, the Catholic foresees that within a few years, France and the Republic would succeed in partitioning the southern provinces. Then France shall become the next door neighbor of these provinces, [and] then shall we Roman Catholics make our presence felt more. The number [of people] of our faith in these provinces is great and considerable, not at all to be compared to the small number of Huguenots in France. The king [of France] shall with good cause be able to say: “I grant the Huguenots freedom of worship in my kingdom; it’s only fair then that you in the United Provinces grant freedom of worship to the Catholics.” The Spaniard, until now our neighbor, has never had the courage to recommend freedom for us Catholics, not even with a letter. For he was our enemy, he gave no freedom to any of the Reformed, and he had no power to give force to his recommendation. None of these points hold for France. It is a friend, and powerful, and it shall hereby win the hearts of all the Catholics in this land. It shall also be able to produce certain treaties, compacts, and promises by which freedom of worship, at least in certain places, has been promised.35
Calvinists had reason to fear the expanding power of France, and to agree with those Dutch politicians who found wisdom in the maxim “Gallus amicus non vicinus”: France could be a useful friend but would make a dangerous neighbor.36 When in the 1660s Louis XIV developed
35
Anon., Munsters vredes-praetje. Vol alderhande opinien, off d’al-ghemeene welvaert deser landen in oorlogh off vrede bestaet, Van Alphen/TEMPO no. 185 (n.p., 1646) (= Knuttel 5290–5295), Bv–B2r. 36 Poelhekke, Frederik Hendrik, 429.
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an overweening ambition to annex the southern Netherlands, it spelled religious as well as political danger for the Republic. Louis’ invasion of the Republic in 1672 had of course religious consequences for the areas occupied by his armies and those of his allies, the Prince-Bishops of Münster and Cologne.37 As expected, French commanders quickly began the process of liberating Dutch Catholics from the shackles of a limited toleration which the latter had always viewed rather as a form of limited persecution.38 In its place, the French introduced a new “religious peace.” In Arnhem, Nijmegen, Zutphen, Deventer, Zwolle and several other cities they allocated one of the existing church buildings, usually the grandest of them, for Catholic use, while leaving the Reformed use of the others. The most symbolic of all church buildings in the Republic, Utrecht’s cathedral, was ceremoniously reconsecrated and likewise appropriated for Catholic worship.39 In Nijmegen and Utrecht, Catholics were numerous and confident enough to behave aggressively, manifesting their faith publicly in processions, funerals, and outdoor decorations. The biconfessionalism introduced by the French had the effect in these two cities of generating more conflict between Catholics and Calvinists than had existed previously, or at least of pushing into the public arena conflict that had remained largely latent and obscured as long as Catholicism had been restricted to the private sphere.40 In the meantime, Catholic regular clergy began to stream into the occupied territories from abroad, reclaiming the former monasteries and convents of their orders. Jesuits founded schools in several occupied towns. Apostolic Vicar Johannes
37 For the following, see Israel, Dutch Republic, 643–4, 796–825, esp. 798–800; M. G. Spiertz, L’Eglise catholique des provinces-unies et le Saint-Siege pendant la deuxieme moitié du XVIIe siecle (Louvain: 1975), 115–25, 160–2; Willem Frijhoff, “Religious toleration in the United Provinces: from ‘case’ to ‘model’ ” in R. Po-chia Hsia and H.F.K. Van Nierop (eds.), Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, UK: 2002), 35; Willem Frijhoff, Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History (Hilversum: 2002), 171–2; Bertrand Forclaz, “ ‘Rather French than Subject to the Prince of Orange.’ The Conflicting Loyalties of the Utrecht Catholics during the French Occupation (1672–73),” Church History and Religious Culture 87 (2007): 509–33; I.B., Le conseil d’extorsion Ou la volerie des François . . . (s.l., s.a. [1673?]); Abraham van Wicquefort, De Fransche Tyrannie . . . (Amsterdam: 1674), passim. 38 Charles H. Parker, Faith on the Margins: Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, MA: 2008), 12–13. 39 See also A. Vanhaelen, “Utrecht’s Transformations: Claiming the Dom through Representation, Iconoclasm and Ritual,” De zeventiende eeuw 21 (2005): 361–2. 40 Forclaz, “Rather French.”
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van Neercassel lobbied at the French court to achieve his and his predecessors’ most cherished goal, the restoration of the archbishopric of Utrecht. Neercassel envisioned a biconfessional arrangement similar to that in France, whereby the Catholic Church would have restored to it at least some of its former benefices, buildings, and other properties. Crucially, Catholics would also become eligible for public office, so that they would share political power with their Calvinist fellow burghers. But the Catholics who in 1672 greeted Louis almost as a messiah were quickly disillusioned. Louis’ strategic goal had never been to take Amsterdam, but rather Brussels, and from the beginning the French had not intended their occupation of Dutch territory to be permanent.41 To be sure, they did propose better conditions for Dutch Catholics. In July 1672 they offered the Dutch a peace treaty under whose terms Catholics would have been allowed the “public exercise” of their religion “throughout the entire United Provinces”; in communities with multiple church buildings, they would have been allocated one, while elsewhere they would have had permission to build a church of their own; provincial authorities would have paid the salaries of Catholic curés as they did those of Calvinist dominees.42 While some members of the States General were ready to sign, their defeatism infuriated the “common people.” The proposal ended up only stiffening Dutch resistance to the French forces, who after several military and diplomatic reverses were obliged by November 1673 to begin withdrawing their forces from the Republic. No sooner did they leave an area than Catholics found themselves forced once again to live their faith under the old restrictions. The eventual peace treaty, concluded in Nijmegen in 1678, did not improve their legal position. The French occupation turned out to be the last time Catholics worshipped entirely publicly in any of the Republic’s seven provinces. Precisely to prevent a repeat of 1672, the Dutch secured in 1697, by the Treaty of Rijswijk, the right to install garrisons in Namur, Ypres, and other fortified towns in the southern Netherlands. These garrisons 41 Paul Sonnino, “Plus royaliste que le pape: Louis XIV’s Religious Policy and his Guerre de Hollande” in David Onnekink (ed.), War and Religion after Westphalia, 1648–1713 (Farnham, UK: 2009), 17–24; Sonnino, Louis XIV and the origins of the Dutch War (Cambridge, UK: 1988). 42 Les conditions sous lesquelles le roy tres-chrestien & sa majesté de la Grande Bretagne consentiroient de faire la paix avec les Etats Generaux, Knuttel/TEMPO no. 10070 (N.p., 1672).
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were expanded in 1715 under the so-called Barrier Treaty. The Dutch soldiers who manned them were allowed to hold Calvinist services, but only “in private places . . . to which one may not give any external mark of a church.” Some of these “private places” actually had a semi-public character: in Tournai, for example, suitable places for worship were set up inside the bourse and the arsenal. Nor did soldiers attend all of these services alone: some native burghers, descendants of 16th-century Calvinists, joined them, manifesting a Protestant identity their families had kept secret for generations. But this was contrary to treaty.43 Biconfessionalism proper was never introduced to any territories except those conquered in 1632. In the latter, however—Maastricht, the Lands of Overmaas, and Upper Gelderland—biconfessionalism proved to be no temporary expedient, but a long-term arrangement that endured, with one interruption in the Lands of Overmaas, for as long as these territories were part of the Republic. These outlying enclaves, surrounded by foreign territory, were the great exception to what is usually described as “the” Dutch religious settlement. * * * When Frederik Hendrik had taken Maastricht, not only had the States General approved a capitulation treaty that guaranteed Catholics freedom of worship, they had also accepted the status of the city as a “condominium,” a territory ruled jointly by the dukes of Brabant and prince-bishops of Liège.44 Legally, the States General had taken over the dukes’ role. So now the city had a Calvinist and a Catholic master, whose two faiths were recognized as enjoying equal status. In ecclesiastical affairs, as in municipal government, the principle of parity formed the basis of life in Maastricht, much as it did in Augsburg and the other German “parity cities” under the Peace of Westphalia. Each
43 Israel, Dutch Republic, 978–9; Eugène Hubert, Les garnisons de la barriere dans les pays-bas autrichiens (1715–1782): etude d’histoire politique et diplomatique (Bruxelles: 1902), 35–113 (quotation on 36–37); Tractaet van barriere, tusschen sijne Keyserlijcke en Catholijcke Majesteyt Karel de VI, sijne Majesteyt van Groot-Brittannien, en de Staten Generael. Gemaeckt en gesloten te Antwerpen den 15. November 1715, (The Hague: 1715). 44 On Maastricht, see P. J. H. Ubachs, Twee heren, twee confessies. De verhouding van Staat en Kerk te Maastricht, 1632–1673 (Assen: 1975); [Rinse van Noordt and M. Tyderman], Tegenwoordige staat der Vereenigde Nederlanden. dl. 2. Vervattende eene beschryving der Generaliteits Landen, Staats Brabant, Staats Land van Overmaaze, Staats Vlaanderen en Staats Opper-Gelderland . . . (Amsterdam: 1751), 343–86.
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confession had a right to half the city’s communal resources, including two of its four parish churches. This right was held by the two confessions as groups, not by their members as individuals, so that the division remained even despite the roughly five-to-one ratio by which Catholics outnumbered Calvinists in the population. Unsurprisingly, Catholics perceived Calvinists as being unfairly favored, while Calvinists for their part pressed the authorities to suppress Catholicism and remove its adherents from power. They did so in vain, for despite having far greater military and political clout than the prince-bishop, Dutch authorities were punctilious in keeping to the letter of the law. Catholics continued to constitute the Liègeois half of the city government, retaining precisely as many offices of each kind as Calvinists held; the mighty Chapter of St. Servaas and its companion, the Chapter of Our Lady continued to function as before, as did monasteries and convents; Catholic charities and schools labored on, funded partly by their medieval endowments, partly by municipal subsidies. Even the Franciscans and Jesuits, banished in 1638 for treason, were allowed to remain in the city after the French (who occupied the city from 1673 to 1678) readmitted them. Catholic worship was restricted only in that processions were not allowed to venture beyond the precincts of St. Servaas, and priests could not carry the viaticum openly to the sick and dying.45 In the three Lands of Overmaas—Dalhem, Valkenburg, and ’s-Hertogenrade—the situation was different. These lands were never condominia, and the rights of Catholics in them had their legal basis only in the capitulation treaty for the city of Limburg, which the Dutch had soon yielded back to the Spanish. Nevertheless, Dutch authorities applied the terms of the treaty also to these lands, which as parts of the duchy were treated as dependencies of the city. In fact, only parts of the three lands fell under Dutch sovereignty, for in 1648 Spain and the Republic agreed to partition them, and under the Partition Treaty of 1661 each side retained portions of all three. The result was to turn the lands into a complex patchwork, with some districts, such as that of Holseth, Vaals, and Vijlen, forming isolated islands.46
45
During the French occupation of 1673–78, Calvinists in Maastricht were allowed to worship publicly, but only in one small church. Munier, Simultaneum, 201–5. 46 J. A. K. Haas, De verdeling van de Landen van Overmaas 1644–1662. Territoriale desintegratie van een betwist grensgebied (Assen: 1978); W. A. J. Munier, “Kerken en
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Unlike Maastricht, which attracted immigrants and had a large garrison, the Lands of Overmaas never became home to a substantial Calvinist population.47 Even more than their co-religionists in Maastricht, Catholics in these rural lands resented bitterly the intrusion of Calvinists from outside, and the privileging of a tiny Calvinist minority. Nor was a system of parity ever introduced, leaving relations between the confessions uncertain and changeable, subject to a host of pressures. There was much to play for and the contest was fairly overt, so it is no wonder tensions ran high and sporadic violence continued to erupt as late as the 1780s. In Vaals, the only place where Calvinist churchgoers matched Catholics in numbers, such violence was endemic. Part of the contest was for control of church buildings: in the Lands of Overmaas, unlike anywhere else in the Republic, Catholics and Calvinists shared their use. This arrangement, known as simultaneum, existed in some other parts of Europe, including several German cities; as a possibility for the Low Countries it had been cited as early as 1578 but never introduced. The Limburg capitulation treaty suggested its introduction in locales that had only one church, and in the 1630s it was instituted everywhere Calvinist ministers were posted. It lasted until the 1661 partition treaty, which granted full sovereignty to the Spanish and Dutch over their respective territories. At that juncture, “the public exercise of religion” being regarded as “a point of sovereignty,” the Dutch felt practically obliged to terminate Catholic use of the churches and replace Catholic officials with Calvinist ones.48 It was the turn of Calvinists to suffer similar repression between 1673 and 1678, during the French occupation. But afterward, once Dutch sovereignty was reestablished, the authorities opted not to return to the status quo ante in every respect. Once again they purged Catholics from local government and imposed Calvinist laws regarding marriage and education. They did not, though, hand the churches back to the Calvinists. Instead, while denying any legal obligation to do so (as the French asserted they had), they reinstated the terms of the 1632 treaty. They never declared this intent explicitly, ordering only that Protestants not be hindered in their use of the churches. Yet in practice,
kerkgangers in Vaals van de Staatse tijd tot op heden,” Jaarboek van het Limburgs Geschied- en Oudheidkundig Genootschap 136–137 (2000–01): 85–262. 47 On Overmaas, see Munier, Simultaneum; [Noordt and Tyderman], Tegenwoordige staat, 387–418. 48 Munier, Simultaneum, 130.
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their actions and words amounted to a revival of simultaneum. In a majority of villages, where they constituted the entire population, Catholics were left to enjoy exclusive, undisturbed use of the old parish churches. In Vaals, Catholics and Calvinists had connected but separate places of worship. In the 13 other locales where Calvinists had regular congregations, Catholics and Calvinists shared use of the local church. In a few other locales, Calvinists held occasional services in churches which they otherwise left to their Catholic neighbors. These arrangements did not change significantly for over a century. In one respect, then, the Lands of Overmaas did not conform after 1678 to the model of biconfessionalism with which this essay began: Catholics in them did not enjoy, as they had done until 1661, de jure official toleration. What had started as a legal right was revived and continued with the connivance of authorities. Yet, once again, Catholics worshiped entirely publicly, and no one pretended that the people of the Lands of Overmaas were of one faith. Upper Gelderland was different again. Though originally one of the four quarters of the province of Gelderland, its status as conquered territory made it, like Maastricht and the Lands of Overmaas, a “Generality Land” governed directly from The Hague. In 1632, the Dutch took one church in each city for use by the Reformed, leaving Catholicism otherwise untouched. Five years later, the Dutch lost these conquests back to the Spanish. With the help of allies, they retook parts of Upper Gelderland in 1702–03 during the War of the Spanish Succession. At this juncture, they reintroduced the earlier arrangement in Venlo and planned to make Roermond a parity city, with Catholic and Reformed faiths exercised “pareillement,” but this aroused such opposition that here too they fell back on the 1632 provisions.49 The future of the region, for the remainder of the 18th century, was settled at the end of the war by a series of treaties in 1713–15, under which the Dutch ceded Roermond back to the Austrians, retaining only Venlo, Stevensweert, and most of the district of Montfort. In these places they pledged to leave Catholicism in its pre-1702 state “without any change or innovation.” But while in Montfort they kept their word, in Venlo and Stevensweert the Dutch retained a church for Reformed worship. In tiny Stevensweert, with its 30-odd houses, it was the only church. In
49 Clive Parry (ed.), The Consolidated Treaty Series, vol. 24 (Dobbs Ferry, NY: 1969–1986), 243–9, 259–67 (quotation on 261); Munier, Simultaneum, 339.
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Venlo, it was a modest chapel which the Reformed enlarged and refurbished, to the consternation of local Catholics, with whom there initially were clashes, especially when Dutch authorities tried to prevent eucharistic processions. Things settled down after a parlay in 1718, and Venlo, which served as the new capital of States-Upper-Gelderland with a mixed Protestant-Catholic appeals court, emerged as a peaceful biconfessional—but not parity—city.50 * * * Viewed from, say, Amsterdam or The Hague, the biconfessionalism instituted in Maastricht, the Lands of Overmaas, and Upper Gelderland appears anomalous, a singular exception to the Dutch norm.51 Yet, as we have seen, biconfessionalism had a history elsewhere in the Republic as well: as temporary expedient, failed experiment, foreign imposition, proposal, fear. Its study offers valuable perspectives on the Dutch religious scene. First, it highlights how remarkable it was that even a superficial, public pretence of religious unity was maintained throughout most of the Republic for most of its history. After all, when the Reformed became the official church of the rebel provinces in the 1570s–80s, its adherents were far outnumbered by those of other churches, principally Catholics. In the Republic’s largest and most tone-setting cities, Catholics and other dissenters continued always to form substantial minorities—as much as 40 percent of the Christian population in Amsterdam—while in rural pockets of Holland, Utrecht, Gelderland, and Overijssel, they constituted a majority.52 In States-Brabant and States-Flanders, the overwhelming majority of inhabitants, in both town and country, belonged to a faith whose clergy, churches, and services were illegal. In these Generality Lands a situation prevailed with few parallels elsewhere in Europe, the closest one perhaps being Ireland. The monopoly of the Reformed Church over
50 Tractaet van barriere, art. 18 (quotation p. 19); J. Habets, Geschiedenis van het bisdom Roermond, vol. 2 (Roermond: 1875), 259–82; [Noordt and Tyderman], Tegenwoordige staat, 552–72; P. Polman, Katholiek Nederland in de achttiende eeuw, vol. 3 (Hilversum: 1968), 131–3, 213–16. Polman’s use of the label “parity” for 18th-century arrangements in Venlo does not accord with present accepted usage of the term. 51 Thus represented by Munier and Ubachs; see references above. 52 Israel, Dutch Republic, 372–89, 637–45. See also H. Knippenberg, De religieuze kaart van Nederland. Omvang en geografische spreiding van de godsdienstige gezindten vanaf de Reformatie tot heden (Assen: 1992), 15–62; J. A. de Kok, Nederland op de breuklijn Rome-Reformatie. Numerieke aspecten van protestantisering en katholieke herleving in de noordelijke Nederlanden, 1580–1880 (Assen: 1964).
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public religious life was established despite repeated efforts by William of Orange to give Calvinists and Catholics equal rights, obvious and nearby foreign models for such an arrangement, and arguments that the latter was superior to freedom of conscience in both practice and principle. It was maintained subsequently despite diplomatic interventions by Spain and France, the inclinations of Frederik Hendrik, at least with regard to the Generality Lands, and lingering pangs of conscience, occasionally expressed, that Dutch Catholics might in justice be owed equal rights for their proven loyalty to the Republic. The experience of more than two dozen cities in the 1570s, however, seemed to demonstrate that biconfessionalism did not work: it did not prevent communities from polarizing along religious lines or Calvinists and Catholics from attacking one another. In other words, it did not promote civic harmony and order, which is what Dutch regents, in their capacity as regents, most wanted from a religious settlement. Biconfessionalism proved in those years to be not a static point of balance, but a labile point along a seemingly inexorable path leading from Catholic to Calvinist dominance. Moreover, while some argued that Catholics would be all the more loyal to a state that did not ban their faith, that state in its formative years defined itself in opposition to an enemy who posed as the champion of Catholicism. By the dominant logic of the confessional age, Dutch Catholics had to choose whether to support the triumph of their church over its enemies, or the triumph of their state over its. Inevitably, the thinking went, they had conflicting loyalties that made them unreliable, if not seditious. Most Dutch Catholics did not in fact treat these two desiderata as absolute, irreconcilable alternatives; in the long run, even most Catholic clergy in the Republic did not maintain so uncompromising a stance. Those who grappled with murky realities, however, conceded the clear air of the moral high ground to the ideological warriors of their day. Why then was biconfessionalism acceptable in Maastricht, the Lands of Overmaas, and Upper Gelderland? Why did it sink roots there, and there alone? Above all, because of the marginality of these small, outlying territories. Biconfessionalism in them set no potent precedent on the national level; it did not threaten the uniquely privileged position of the Reformed Church elsewhere in the Republic. By the same token, it did not achieve one of its intended purposes, to set an example that would encourage the rest of the southern Netherlands to join the Republic. Biconfessionalism was a religious bargain made
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by Frederik Hendrik and the States General in exchange for territorial expansion, and they were prepared to extend it further—indeed, some were willing even to accept officially Catholic provinces into the Republic—in order to realize their greater ambition of reuniting the 17 provinces of the northern and southern Netherlands. In the meantime, the arrangements established in 1632 proved workable enough, and they did set local precedents. Though Dutch authorities felt no legal obligation to maintain them in perpetuity, it is striking how, after various experiments, they eventually settled on reinstating the provisions of the 1632 capitulation treaties, even after later treaties seemed to supersede them—in 1678 in the Lands of Overmaas, 1715 in Upper Gelderland. In these two areas, biconfessionalism was reintroduced, or continued, even after it had lost its original legal basis. Studying biconfessionalism in the Netherlands reminds us also that religious arrangements in the Dutch Republic were more varied than sometimes portrayed. To be sure, native religious dissenters worshipped for the most part in schuilkerken. But along the periphery of the Republic, especially the long border with the southern Netherlands, Catholics also travelled regularly to attend mass in neighboring communities where their faith was the established one. Catholics from the interior of the Republic made these treks too on an occasional basis, especially to pilgrimage sites such as Handel, Uden, and Kevelaar. Lutherans, who for the most part were foreign immigrants or the not-too-distant descendants of such, were allowed to have highly visible places of worship, easily recognizable as such, though still without tower or bells. A different dispensation altogether applied to Jews, who could build imposing synagogues but suffered civil disabilities to which no Christian was subject. Superimposed on these general patterns were countless variations between provinces, towns, and villages, and significant (but still understudied) change over time. Even a single polity needed a variety of forms of toleration to accommodate different groups and circumstances, and that was especially true of a polity as diverse and decentralized as the Dutch Republic.
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Emden
Appingedam Dokkum
STAD EN LANDE Groningen
Leeuwarden FRIESLAND Sneek
Harlingen
Rolde DRENTHE
Stavoren Medemblik Enkhuizen
Coevorden
Zwolle Haarlem
Almelo OVERIJSSEL
Amsterdam ‘s-Gravenhage (The Hague) HOLLAND Delft
GELDERLAND Arnhem
Borculo
Nijmegen Kleve Culjk ‘s-Hertogenbosch
Breda STAATS-BRABANT
Gelder UPPER GELDERLAND Venlo
STAATS-VLAANDEREN Brugge
Enschede
Zutphen
UTRECHT
Dordrecht ZEELAND Middleburg
Deventer
Utrecht
Wesel Essen Moers Werden
Antwerpen
Nieuwpoort Gent Duinkerken
BRABANT Mechelen Leuven Brussel
VLAANDEREN (FLANDERS) Kortrijk
Rijsel Doornik DOORNIK EN HET DOORNIKSE
ARTOIS Atrecht (Arras)
GERMAN EMPIRE
LUIK
LANDS OF OVERMAAS Jülich Maastricht Aachen Luik
LIMBURG Limburg
Cologne
Bonn
Namen NAMEN
Bergen
HAINAUT
STAVELOT- Stavelot MALMEDY
Kamerijk LUIK (LIÈGE) BOUILLON Bouilion
FRANCE
LUXEMBURG Trier Luxemburg
Map 1: The Dutch Republic in 1648.
PART THREE
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
A MULTICONFESSIONAL EMPIRE David M. Luebke “On Sundays and feast days,” reported a priest in the village of Berge, “my Lutherans worship in our church and take part in the service with the Catholic parishioners.” Why? Perhaps because the nearest Lutheran parish church was simply too far away to attend regularly. Perhaps it was because the Lutheran families owned a pew in the parish church—a potent symbol of social standing that no family surrendered lightly. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that in Berge, confessional differences did not always stand in the way of common religious experience. To be sure, confessional identities were firmly in place: parishioners described themselves as “Lutherans” or “Catholics” and held profoundly divergent beliefs about the nature of sin and the true path to salvation. And of course the Lutherans could not receive sacraments from the priest. But they attended Mass and heard his sermons; they stood as godparents at Catholic baptisms; the dead of both faiths were buried in a common parish churchyard.1 By the standard of late-17th century Germany, this was an unusually amicable state of affairs. To some extent, it reflected the peculiarities of place: Berge was situated in the Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück, one of several German territories in which two or more confessions were practiced legally and openly. After 1648, even the office of prince-bishop alternated between Catholic and Lutheran occupants.2 At the opposite extreme was the diocese of Münster, Osnabrück’s neighbor to the south. There, Prince-Bishop Ferdinand I (1612–1650) and his successors waged a campaign of force and persuasion that, by the mid-18th century,
1 Hermann Hoberg, Die Gemeinschaft der Bekenntnisse in kirchlichen Dingen: Rechtszustände im Fürstentum Osnabrück vom Westfälischen Frieden bis zum Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts (Osnabrück: 1939), 31–44. 2 On Osnabrück’s peculiar system of confessional rotation, see Michael F. Feldkamp, “Zur Bedeutung der successio alternativa im Hochstift Osnabrück während des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts,” Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 130 (1994): 75–110.
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had produced a thoroughly Catholic religious culture in which the sort of conviviality found in Berge could not arise.3 Most of the several hundred territories and city-states that constituted the Holy Roman Empire could be found somewhere on a continuum between these poles. Most strove to match the near-seamless homogeneity that Münster’s prince-bishops apparently achieved. Nevertheless, what stands out about the Empire is the large number of polities that accommodated confessionally diverse populations, granted official status to religious minorities, or even “provided a constitutional guarantee of confessional parity.”4 Equally distinctive is the durability of these concessions, many of which persisted after the Empire’s dissolution in 1806. The forces that shaped these structures operated at many levels. Some were bound up with the Empire’s unique deliberative and judicial institutions; others reflected local or regional peculiarities, such as the social configuration of power within a territory. There were cultural forces at play as well, not the least of which was the sheer inertia of religion: as Luther learned to his grief, conversion on a mass scale was the work of decades, even generations.
3 Werner Freitag, Volks- und Elitenfrömmigkeit in der frühen Neuzeit: Marienwallfahrten im Fürstbistum Münster (Paderborn: 1991); Andreas Holzem, Religion und Lebensformen: Katholische Konfessionalisierung im Sendgericht des Fürtsbistums Münster, 1570–1800 (Paderborn: 2000). 4 Anton Schindling, “Neighbours of a Different Faith: Confessional Coexistence and Parity in the Territorial States and Towns of the Empire” in Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (eds.), 1648: War and Peace in Europe, 3 vols. (Münster: 1999), vol. 1, 465–483, here 465. A word on terminology: in what follows, the terms “biconfessional” and “triconfessional” refer to a broad spectrum of arrangements in which more than one confession were exercised within a single jurisdiction, whether or not all enjoyed full legal recognition. The terms therefore describe communities that were bi- or triconfessional as a matter of practice, if not in point of law. The terms “equal” or “coequal” describe bi- or triconfessional arrangements in which relations between the two (or three) faiths were predicated on the assumption of equal status. “Parity” refers specifically to biconfessional communities in which resources were shared, and to deliberative procedures that were conducted, on the basis of “exact and mutual equality” (exacta et mutuaque aequalitas) under the terms of the Peace of Westphalia, specifically Article V, § 1 of the portion signed in Osnabrück, the Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugensis (hereafter IPO). The full text of the German version can be found at the Internet-Portal “Westfälische Geschichte,” http://www.westfaelische-geschichte.de/que740, which is based on the edition of Arno Buschmann in idem (ed.), Kaiser und Reich: Klassische Texte zur Verfassungsgeschichte des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation vom Beginn des 12. Jh. bis zum Jahre 1806 (Munich: 1984). On the legal principle of confessional parity, see Martin Heckel, “Parität,” Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 49 (1963): 261–420.
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Any attempt to impose orthodoxy was bound to generate dissent, and with it the pluralization of belief and religious practice. The following essay examines each of these layers in turn. The first segment inquires after the imperial framework and confronts the paradoxical fact that the Empire developed a durable multiconfessional regime in the absence of norms that endorsed plurality. Indeed, all but a few regarded plurality as a sign of disorder and decay. The Empire’s multiconfessional regime therefore emerged in a vacuum between hope for the restoration of unity and the hard realities of power politics. It evolved in fits and starts, amid outbreaks of armed confrontation, until a lasting settlement was achieved in 1555. To be sure, the Religious Peace did not so much end conflicts as reorganize them; and the system eventually came apart in the decades after 1600. Still, the salient point remains that the Empire’s deliberative bodies and judicial tribunals provided a framework for the mediation of confessional differences, which blunted the violent edge of religious conflicts by transforming them into objects of diplomatic negotiation and legal wrangling. At the imperial level, the result was a decidedly rule-bound mode of dealing with religious plurality, a mode that would revive with new vigor after the Thirty Years’ War. A second segment sketches the wide variety of multiconfessional regimes that took shape at the local level. In principle, the Religious Peace conferred on the Empire’s princes the right to establish religion (ius reformandi). But this did not halt the progress of pluralization. From the 1570s onward, confessional relations were shaped by the determination of secular authorities to impose their will; by domestic constraints on the exercise of state power; and by the responses of parishioners and curates to external pressure. Where plurality was not extinguished, the results typically fell into one of several broad patterns of coexistence, not always peaceful, ranging from the unofficial, pragmatic toleration of religious minorities to full, legal parity between two or more confessional groups. The third section charts the transformation of confessional boundaries during the period after the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. Broadly speaking, confessional communities became more exclusive and barriers between them grew more rigid. By the late-17th and 18th centuries, enclosed confessional communities had finally supplanted earlier and more expansive structures. But the ossification of confessional boundaries did not necessarily make for hostile relations. On the contrary, the
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mediation of confessional difference was often more effective at smothering religious violence under the rigid, post-1648 regime of confessional sequestration. In contrast to the 16th century, similarly, the effect of state action was to increase confessional heterogeneity, not diminish it. Imperial Contexts The Reformation occurred at a time when the Empire was undergoing political reforms that transformed its deliberative body, consolidating its legislative powers and formalizing its procedures and solemnities.5 Out of these reforms, the assembly—which started calling itself a Reichstag (“Imperial Diet”) in 1495—acquired considerable autonomy. Although the Emperor summoned each meeting and set its order of business, the Diet did not require his physical presence and exhibited increasing independence as a law-making and tax-granting body. The most prominent expression of this autonomy was the creation, also in 1495, of a supreme judicial tribunal, the Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht), with power to enforce the peace of the Empire. The Emperor named its presiding judge and chamber presidents, but the “assessors”—the justices who actually decided each case—were the Diet’s appointees. As a whole, the Empire was becoming a system of shared or “complimentary” governance.6 For all this innovation, however, the Diet remained a corpus mysticum—the ceremonial incarnation of the body politic and of the whole Empire as a “sacral community.”7 The schism between Protestants and Catholics disrupted this system profoundly.8 Few events
5 Winfried Schulze, “Der deutsche Reichstag des 16. Jahrhunderts zwischen traditioneller Konsensbildung und Paritätisierung der Reichspolitik” in Heinz Duchhardt and Gert Melville (eds.), Im Spannungsfeld von Recht und Ritual: Soziale Kommunikation in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Cologne: 1997), 447–461. 6 Georg Schmidt, Geschichte des Alten Reiches: Staat und Nation in der Frühen Neuzeit, 1495–1806 (Munich: 1999), 44–55. 7 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (Munich: 2009), 89–96. 8 In what follows, I use the term “Protestant” if the matter under discussion goes to the fundamental division between old church and new in a manner that transcends differences between Lutheran and Reformed. I also use the term “Protestant” if it is not possible to assign the person or group in question to a more precise confessional grouping, or if doing so would impose greater theological precision on the self-understanding of that person or group than the historical record warrants. Where
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dramatized its effects as vividly as a Diet held in Augsburg during in the summer and autumn of 1530. For the first time in more than a decade, the Emperor, Charles V (1519–1556), attended in person, determined to restore unity to the church. No fewer than 42 princes, counts, and lords showed up for the deliberations; another 58 sent delegates; 30 imperial free cities were represented as well. It was, in short, one of the best-attended diets of the 16th century.9 But the rift over religion played havoc with the assembly’s usual rites and ceremonies. The Protestant princes could not participate in the inaugural Mass without seeming to endorse the doctrine of transubstantiation. Theological controversy also intruded on the Diet’s secular solemnities. Lest anyone suspect that his participation in the Emperor’s festive entry into Augsburg signified a softening of his theological stance, the Landgrave Philipp of Hessen and his entourage wore armbands bearing the Protestant legend V.D.M.I.E.—verbum Domini manet in eternum, “The word of the Lord endures in eternity.”10 The Diet of 1530 is best known for the Augsburg Confession—the statement of core beliefs, compiled by Philipp Melanchthon, on behalf of the princes and city-states that had aligned themselves with Martin Luther. It was also a moment when Christian unity seemed lost for good and with it the very capacity of imperial bodies to deal peaceably with the schism.11 The Diet’s resolution of 19 November—passed by the Catholic majority after most of the Protestant members had slipped out of town—condemned any further “innovation” in religion as a breach of the imperial peace, which amounted to a declaration of legal warfare against adherents of the Augsburg Confession.12 The Diet of 1530 was therefore an important milestone in the progress it makes no difference and it is possible to describe the person or group accurately as “Lutheran” or “Calvinist” or “Mennonite,” I have done so. 9 Figures based on Rosemarie Aulinger, Das Bild des Reichstages im 16. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: 1980), appendix VII, 358–374. 10 On the ceremonial aspects of the Diet of 1530, see Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider, 93–136; and Aulinger, Bild des Reichstages, 328–346. 11 Albrecht Pius Luttenberger, Glaubenseinheit und Reichsfriede: Konzeptionen und Wege konfessionsneutraler Reichspolitik (1530–1552) (Gottingen: 1982), 26–29, 33–37; Armin Kohnle, Reichstag und Reformation: Kaiserliche und ständische Religionspolitik von den Anfängen der Causa Lutheri bis zum Nürnberger Religionsfrieden (Gütersloh: 2001). 12 Martin Heckel, “Die Religionsprozesse des Reichskammergerichts im konfessionell gespaltenen Reichskirchenrecht,” Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 77 (1991): 130–162, here 289–290; Axel Gotthard, Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden (Münster: 2004), 180–181.
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of confessionalization—the codification of doctrines and liturgies that flowed from a close and increasingly militant alliance between secular rulers, theologians, and ecclesiastical authorities on both sides of the religious divide. But the Diet also exposed structures and practices that weathered the storm of religious controversy. First, the schism did not hobble the Diet’s legislative functions: behind the scenes, committees quietly worked through important matters of law, finance, and the common defense, unhindered by the controversy swirling around them. Committees tasked with working out a religious settlement were staffed with equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics—an arrangement that tacitly recognized Protestants collectively as an equal party to negotiation in matters of religion. Subsequent assemblies, finally, resolved the ceremonial problems raised in 1530 by allowing Protestant princes to attend the inaugural Mass, but without obliging them to join in the Catholic communion rite. This solution was predicated on a novel distinction between religion and political order that acknowledged the schism symbolically without allowing it to bring down the entire liturgical edifice.13 From there, it was a short step to the realization that a subject could remain loyal without adhering to his overlord’s religion.14 A quarter century would elapse before a durable religious settlement was in place. But its elements had begun to take shape already in 1532, when a set of agreements called the “Nürnberg Standstill” suspended all suits before the Imperial Chamber Court concerning “faith and religion.” This effectively legalized the seizures of church property by Protestant princes and the violence that had attended them. Two brief wars and a failed attempt to impose a temporary ecclesio-political unity—the “Interim” of 1548—cancelled out alternatives to a political solution that simply ruled out all questions of theological truth.15 In 1555, finally, the Diet gave its blessing to an idea that the ius reformandi should belong to the individual estates of the Empire. This was the essence of the Religious Peace of 1555, which was summed up 13
Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider, 135. Hans R. Guggisberg, “The Defence of Religious Toleration and Religious Liberty in Early Modern Europe: Arguments, Pressures, and Some Consequences,” History of European Ideas 4 (1982): 35–50. 15 Armin Kohnle, “Nürnberg—Passau—Augsburg: Der lange Weg zum Religionsfrieden” in Heinz Schilling and Heribert Smolinsky (eds.), Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden 1555 (Münster: 2007), 5–16. 14
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by the legal formula cuius regio, eius religio—“he who rules determines the religion.” The meaning of that dictum, however, only gradually acquired the clarity attributed to it from the 17th century on. For one thing, the phrase first appeared in 1587, in connection with a decision to make princely territories, as opposed to lineages, the basic units of representation.16 The Religious Peace also imposed limits on the right of princes. The Diet allowed only two lawful options, Catholicism and the Augsburg Confession.17 Another limitation was the so-called “ecclesiastical reservation,” which stipulated that any prince-bishop or imperial prelate who wished to convert to the Augsburg Confession must surrender his office with “all [its] fruits and incomes.”18 And there was an exception to the exception: the Declaratio Ferdinandea, a royal codicil that granted religious toleration to corporations within ecclesiastical territories, which had practiced the Augsburg Confession “for many years” (lange zeit und jar). Forcible conversion was forbidden categorically; non-conformists were given the right to emigrate in an orderly manner.19 Imperial cities in which both confessions were already practiced became officially biconfessional.20 Finally, the Diet required the Imperial Chamber Court to adopt a confessionally neutral stance.21 From 1555 on, therefore, the Empire was a biconfessional realm; as a practical matter, it became triconfessional in 1566, when the Lutheran princes refused to condemn Friedrich III, the Palatine Elector, for his adherence to the “Calvinist sect.”22 The Empire was no longer, strictly speaking, a sacral community. It is easy to dismiss the Religious Peace of 1555 as a jumble of inconsistent half-measures that failed to place confessional relations
16 Bernd Christian Schneider, Ius reformandi: Die Entwicklung eines Staatskirchenrechts von seinen Anfängen bis zum Ende des Alten Reiches (Tübingen: 2001), especially 218–228, 256–268, 316–320; and Robert von Friedeburg, “Cuius regio, eius religio: The Ambivalent Meanings of State-Building in Protestant Germany, 1555–1655” forthcoming in Howard P. Louthan et al. (eds.), Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500–1800 (New York: 2011). 17 Augsburger Reichstagsabschied 1555 (hereafter ARA) § 15. The full text of the German version can be found at the Internet-Portal “Westfälische Geschichte,” http:// www.westfaelische-geschichte.de/que739, which is based on the edition of Buschmann, Kaiser und Reich. 18 ARA § 21. 19 ARA §§ 23–24. 20 ARA § 27. 21 ARA §§ 32–33. 22 Maximilian Lanzinner and Dietmar Heil “Der Augsburger Reichstag 1566: Ergebnisse einer Edition,” Historische Zeitschrift 274 (2002): 603–632.
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on a secure footing. In the interest of reaching an agreement, its framers used legal wording that already had sharply divergent meanings for Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed jurists.23 Who, for example, counted as “adherents” (Verwandte) of the Augsburg Confession?24 Reformed Protestants included themselves in that category, but most Catholic and Lutheran jurists excluded them. Such dissimulation, so the argument goes, exacerbated misunderstanding and uncertainty over the long term. Even worse, Protestants and Catholics disputed the legal status of key provisions: the former rejected the ecclesiastical reservation on the grounds that it compromised the princes’ freedom of conscience, for example, while the latter never accepted the Declaratio Ferdinandea as legally binding. Thus a crisis of legitimacy was “preprogrammed”: imperial jurisprudence gained acceptance only to the extent that litigants could expect consistency. Precisely this was lacking.25 But this interpretation obscures the fundamental achievement of the Religious Peace, which was to “judicialize” religious conflict.26 Concretely, judicialization meant that conflicts over religion were transformed into legal battles over the proper interpretation of the 1555 settlement. Its ultimate arbiter was the Imperial Chamber Court, which from 1560 on was obligated to appoint equal numbers of Protestant and Catholic assessors in cases involving religion—an example of what might be called procedural coequality. In functional terms, judicialization neutralized religious conflicts by subjecting them to the slow, deliberate pace of litigation. Indeed, for many litigants, the appeal of imperial tribunals lay not in their consistency, but in the fact that lawsuits could attenuate the status quo for years, even decades.27 23 Martin Heckel, “Die Reformationsprozesse im Spannungsfeld des Reichskirchensystems” in Bernhard Diestelkamp (ed.), Die politische Funktion des Reichskammergerichts (Cologne: 1993), 9–40, here 21. 24 Irene Dingel, “Augsburger Religionsfrieden und ‘Augsburger Konfessionsverwandtschaft’: Konfessionelle Lesearten” in Schilling and Smolinsky, Augsburger Religionsfrieden, 157–176. 25 Martin Heckel, “Autonomia und Pacis Compositio: Der Augsburger Religionsfriede in der Deutung der Gegenreformation,” Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 45 (1959): 141–248. The interpretation invoked here is Gotthard’s, Augsburger Religionsfrieden, 271–280. 26 Horst Rabe, “Der Augsburger Religionsfriede und das Reichskammergericht 1555–1600” in idem et al. (eds.), Festgabe für Ernst Walter Zeeden zum 60. Geburtstag (Münster: 1976), 260–280. 27 See Bernhard Ruthmann, Die Religionsprozesse am Reichskammergericht (1555– 1648): Eine Analyse anhand ausgewählter Prozesse (Cologne: 1996), 567–580.
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Meanwhile, sessions of the Imperial Diet went about their business as before, setting aside confessional differences to continue the Empire’s judicial and administrative reforms and to fund its defense against the Ottoman Empire.28 The contrast to confessional conflict in war-torn western Europe could hardly be more striking. The great weakness of this system was that it lacked grounding in shared norms that could withstand the centripetal force of religious loyalties. Only a few theorists attempted to justify confessional plurality as a positive good; most considered it at best a necessary evil.29 Secularizing norms such as concordia, “nation,” or the common good were barely adequate to the task of legitimating a confessionally pluralistic political order.30 Instead, the Peace depended heavily on trust that had built up after 1555. By the 1580s, however, consensus had begun to erode over the basic status of the Religious Peace. Catholic polemicists, revitalized after the Council of Trent, argued that the free disposition of princes in matters of religion was tantamount to arbitrary rule and therefore inconsistent with a well-ordered Christian government. Embedded in this argumentation were the propositions that the Religious Peace had been a temporary measure all along and therefore that the confessions could not be regarded as fully equal. For their part, Protestants continued to regard the Peace as fundamental to the Empire’s constitutional order and pressed for a thorough-going extension of legal and procedural coequality into all transactions of the Diet and the imperial courts, including those matters that did not pertain directly to religion.31 When these efforts did not bear fruit,
28 Lanzinner and Heil, “Augsburger Reichstag von 1566.” For simplicity’s sake, this analysis has excluded consideration of an imperial tribunal that was attached to the office of Emperor, the Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat), established by Ferdinand I in 1556 as a counterweight to the Imperial Chamber Court. In the late 16th century, it had the reputation of pro-Catholic bias, but, as Stefan Ehrenpreis’s recent study suggests, this reputation was unwarranted; see his Kaiserliche Gerichsbarkeit und Konfessionskonflikt: Der Reichshofrat unter Rudolf II (1576–1612) (Göttingen: 2006). 29 One anonymous Austrian pamphleteer likened the Empire’s multiconfessional regime to a body with many limbs, on which the good of the whole depended; see Ralf-Peter Fuchs, “From Pluralization to True Belief? An Austrian Treatise on Religious Freedom (1624)” in Andreas Höfele et al. (eds.), Representing Religious Pluralization in Early Modern Europe (Berlin: 2007), 113–131. 30 On the use of “nation” as a compensatory norm, see Georg Schmidt, “Die frühneuzeitliche Idee ‘deutsche Nation’: Mehrkonfessionalität und säkulare Werte” in Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche (eds.), Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt: 2001), 33–67. 31 Schulze, “Der deutsche Reichstag,” 454.
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many lost confidence that imperial tribunals would treat religious matters neutrally. Meanwhile friction between Lutherans and Calvinists had begun to disable the tactical unity that Protestants usually displayed in politics at the imperial level.32 It would be misleading to depict the polarization in the stark tones of theologians and polemicists. The most recent research, for example, situates confessional tension among a wide variety of causes for the Thirty Years’ War.33 Some Protestant princes, such as the Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony, found it expedient to ally with the Catholic Emperor; likewise the imperial court continued to pursue a moderate policy in confessional matters long after 1610; and irenicism never fully disappeared.34 Nevertheless, the climate of reciprocal demonization that prevailed after 1600 interfered with the ability of imperial courts to diffuse conflicts over religion.35 Even the Empire’s ability to fund the common defense was impaired.36 Local conflicts that the imperial system might once have absorbed instead became flashpoints of general antagonism—such as the Donauwörth Affair (1608), a dispute over Catholic processions in a biconfessional imperial city that provoked its annexation by Bavaria.37 Legal and procedural coequality
32 See most recently Axel Gotthard, “ ‘Wer sich salviren könd, solts thun’: Warum der deutsche Protestantismus in der Zeit der konfessionellen Polarisierung zu keiner gemeinsamen Politik fand,” Historisches Jahrbuch 121 (2001): 65–96. 33 Stefan Ehrenpreis, “Die Rolle des Kaiserhofes in der Reichsverfassungskrise und im europäischen Mächtesystem vor dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg” in Winfried Schulze (ed.), Friedliche Intentionen—Kriegerische Effekte: War der Ausbruch des Dreißigjährigen Krieges unvermeidlich? (St. Katharinen: 2002), 71–106; Winfried Schulze, “Pluralisierung als Bedrohung: Toleranz als Lösung” in Heinz Duchhardt (ed.), Der Westfälische Friede: Diplomatie—politische Zäsur—kulturelles Umfeld—Rezeptionsgeschichte (Munich: 1998), 115–140. 34 Howard Hotson, “Irenicism in the Confessional Age: The Holy Roman Empire, 1563–1648” in Howard P. Louthan and Randall C. Zachmann (eds.), Confession and Conciliation: The Struggle for Unity in the Age of Reform, 1415–1648 (South Bend: 2004), 228–285. 35 Dietrich Kratsch, “Decision oder Interpretation? Der ‘Vierklosterstreit’ vor dem Reichskammergericht” in Bernhard Diestelkamp (ed.), Die politische Funktion des Reichskammergerichts (Cologne: 1993), 41–58. 36 Winfried Schulze, “Konfessionsfundamentalismus in Europa um 1600: Zwischen discordia und compositio” in Heinz Schilling (ed.), Konfessioneller Fundamentalismus (Munich: 2007), 135–148. 37 Axel Gotthard, “Der deutsche Konfessionskrieg seit 1619: Ein Resultat gestörter politischer Kommunikation,” Historisches Jahrbuch 122 (2002): 141–172; C. Scott Dixon, “Urban Order and Religious Coexistence in the German Imperial City: Augsburg and Donauwörth, 1548–1608,” Central European History 40 (2007): 1–33.
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between the confessions would be restored, eventually, but not until the Thirty Years’ War had run its bloody course. Modes of Coexistence Many of the forces at play at the imperial level also shaped confessional relations locally—with the crucial difference that, after 1555, imperial princes and free cities possessed the right to establish religion in the parishes subject to their secular authority. With few exceptions, Protestant and Catholic authorities understood this provision to endorse their efforts to forge confessionally homogeneous subject populations. From their point of view, the devolution of ius reformandi made obedience to secular authority synonymous with obedience to existing directives regarding religion. The tools they used to achieve this—visitations, strict controls over clerical appointments, religious tests for office-holding or residency, the persecution of heterodoxy, and so on—generated new and more stringent criteria for social inclusion and exclusion.38 But the formation of confessional subcultures cannot be comprehended solely from the standpoint of princes and bishops; still less are local patterns of multiconfessional accommodation comprehensible unless they are also viewed from below.39 For one thing, not everyone shared the assumption that confessional plurality was incompatible with parochial unity.40 Time and again, ordinary parishioners exhibited an accommodating stance, in some cases indifference, toward confessional divisions.41 Often curates, too, proved willing to adapt.
38 Wolfgang Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 10 (1983): 257–277. The best overview in English remains R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London: 1989). 39 Anton Schindling, “Konfessionalisierung und Grenzen von Konfessionalisierbarkeit” in Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler (eds.), Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung, vol. 7 (Münster: 1995), 9–44; Winfried Schulze, “Konfessionalisierung als Paradigma zur Erforschung des konfessionellen Zeitalters” in Burkhardt Dietz and Stefan Ehrenpreis (eds.), Drei Konfessionen in einer Region: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Konfessionalisierung im Herzogtum Berg vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne: 1999), 15–30. 40 Thomas Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur: Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tübingen: 2006), here 14–16. 41 Nicole Grochowina, “Grenzen der Konfessionalisierung: Dissidententum und konfessionelle Indifferenz im Ostfriesland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts” in Kaspar
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Similarly, not all assumed that social and political cohesion were incompatible with religious plurality—especially if communal wellbeing or the preservation of autonomy depended on accommodating it.42 The elasticity of social being underlying these behaviors contradicts the assumption that confessional identity was from the start an all-encompassing category of belonging.43 Finally, local corporations and privileged elites often found reason to preserve the ecclesiopolitical status quo against efforts to purge it of heterodoxy. At the local level, then, multiconfessional regimes typically emerged at the limits of state or magisterial power and reproduced the character of constraints on its exercise—including the constraints of imperial law. Bearing these qualifications in mind, one can distinguish at least six general patterns of multiconfessional coexistence at the local level, which varied by degree of legal formalization; by their relation to secular and ecclesiastical authority, their structure, coherence and efficacy; by the nature and degree of confessional pressure brought to bear against them; by the attitude of parishioners, curates, and local elites toward religious pluralization; and by the precision with which confessional boundaries were delineated.44 Hybrid: The earliest pattern, and arguably the most widespread, was also the most idiosyncratic. Parish priests, confronted with diverging liturgical demands among their parishioners, strove to preserve parochial cohesion by accommodating pluralization ad hoc. The Saxon visitation of 1526, for example, turned up pastors who distributed the sacraments in one or both kinds, at different hours but from the same
von Greyerz et al. (eds.), Interkonfessionalität—Transkonfessionalität—binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität: Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionalisierungsthese (Gütersloh: 2003), 16–47. 42 Robert W. Scribner called this the “toleration of practical rationality”. See idem, “Preconditions of Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth-Century Germany” in Ole Peter Grell and Robert W. Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, UK: 1996), 34–47. 43 Frauke Volkland, Konfession und Selbstverständnis: Reformierte Rituale in der gemischtkonfessionellen Kleinstadt Bischofszell im 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: 2005). 44 These categories are my effort to synthesize the recent outpouring of research, including my own, on confessional coexistence in the empire and elsewhere in early modern Europe. I owe a special intellectual debt to Ernst Walter Zeeden, whose classic overview, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Munich: 1965), first drew attention to the many liturgical adaptations that characterized the first phase of confessional differentiation.
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altar.45 To some extent, these syncretistic adaptations reproduced the ragged indeterminacy of belief during the earlier phases of confessional differentiation. The confessional status of the “chalice movement,” for example, long remained murky. For one thing, the Interim of 1548 had allowed laity to receive the communion chalice in parishes where the custom was already established. Even in Catholic Bavaria, Duke Albrecht V in 1553 waived all penalties for communicating sub utraque within the Catholic Mass, then legalized the practice after a papal concession arrived in 1564.46 In many regions, demand for the lay chalice did not become an unambiguous marker of “heretical” inclinations until well into the 1560s.47 Elsewhere, ad hoc adaptations of confessional difference reflected the solicitude of parish clergy. How else to account for Adolf Eckrath, who served simultaneously as a Reformed minister of Solingen and as a Catholic priest in Bensberg? Or the chameleon-like Gerhard Venraid, a Lutheran convert who took up a Catholic post in Sonsbeck in 1563, then served as first minister to the Reformed congregation in Wesel (1571–1578), and ended his career as a Catholic priest in Königswinter, distributing the Eucharist sub una specie?48 Elsewhere still, liturgical accommodations of confessional plurality may also have reflected the deliberate choice of a middle path between Rome and Wittenberg. In 1549, for example, a visitation in Lippe revealed that most rural clergy had married and professed a mixture of Lutheran and Catholic doctrines, while preserving the trappings and ceremonies of the old faith.49 In the united duchies of Jülich,
45 Hermann Nottarp, “Zur communicatio cum haereticis: Deutsche Rechtszustände im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert” in Friedrich Merzbacher (ed.), Hermann Nottarp: Aus Rechtsgeschichte und Kirchenrecht (Cologne: 1967), 424–446. 46 Albrecht forbade the lay chalice, however, in 1571; Alois Knöpfler, Die Kelchbewegung in Bayern unter Herzog Albrecht V: Ein Beitrag zur Reformationsgeschichte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Munich: 1891), 1–27, 113–116, 142–148, 212–221. 47 Andreas Holzem, “Katholische Konfessionskultur im Westfalen der Frühen Neuzeit: Glaubenswissen und Glaubenspraxis in agrarischen Lebens- und Erfahrungsräumen,” Westfälische Forschungen 56 (2006): 65–87. 48 On Eckrath, see Kurt Wesoly, “Katholisch, lutherisch, reformiert, evangelisch? Zu den Anfängen der Reformation im Bergischen Land” in Dietz and Ehrenpreis, Drei Konfessionen, 291–306, here 300; on Venraid, see August Franzen, “Die Herausbildung des Konfessionsbewußtseins am Niederrhein im 16. Jahrhundert,” Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 158 (1956): 164–209, here 185–190. My thanks go to Jesse Spohnholz for the reference to Venraid. 49 Johannes Bauermann, “Die katholische Visitation Lippes im Jahre 1549: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Interims in Westfalen,” Jahrbuch für Westfälische Kirchengeschichte 44 (1951): 113–146, here 135–138.
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Kleve, and Berg, famously, the “middle path” remained ducal policy until 1567. Even after that date, there was no serious effort to impose confessional orthodoxy.50 Subcutaneous: However they evolved, adaptations of the first type managed to conserve the ritual unity of parish communities by blurring lines of distinction between the confessions.51 The second type produced a similar effect, but in response to radically different circumstances— repression and the thorough confessionalization of sacred space. To speak of persecuted religious minorities in these terms may seem perverse, but in certain cases, their experiences fit the bill. The Alpine and Bohemian crypto-Protestants are a case in point: the very size and persistence of these hidden communities attests to forms of everyday acceptance on the part of rural Catholics.52 Since the 1620s, they had been regarded as rebels, against whom the most draconian measures were warranted, including confinement in “conversion houses” and expulsion.53 These assaults exposed the undiminished determination of princes to achieve confessional homogeneity. But they also revealed the limits of state power. Until the 1730s, local representatives of secular and ecclesiastical authority were unable to penetrate the networks of mutual dependence and kinship that tied crypto-Protestant villagers to their Catholic neighbors.54 Protestant parishioners—deprived of their own ministers since the early-17th century—rendered themselves liturgically indistinguishable from Catholics, or nearly so: they were married by Catholic priests, buried their dead in parish churchyards, 50 Stefan Ehrenpreis, “Die Vereinigten Herzogtümer Jülich-Kleve-Berg und der Augsburger Religionsfrieden” in Schilling and Smolinsky, Augsburger Religionsfrieden, 239–267. 51 The characterization of these regimes as “subcutaneous” comes from Martin Scheutz, “Das Offizielle und das Subkutane: Katholische Frömmigkeit und die Geheimprotestanten in den österreichischen Erbländern,” paper delivered at the conference “Liturgisches Handeln und soziale Praxis: Symbolische Kommunikation im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung,” Münster, 1 June 2009. I am grateful to Professor Scheutz for providing a copy of his paper. 52 See most recently the essays contained in Rudolf Leeb, Martin Scheutz, and Dietmar Weikl (eds.), Geheimprotestantismus und evangelische Kirchen in der Habsburgermonarchie und im Erzstift Salzburg (17./18. Jahrhundert) (Vienna: 2009). 53 Martin Scheutz, “Die ‘fünfte Kolonne’: Geheimprotestanten im 18. Jahrhundert in der Habsburgermonarchie und deren Inhaftierung in Konversionshäusern (1752– 1775),” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung 114 (2006): 329–380, here 351–365. 54 Martin Scheutz, “Konfessionalisierung von unten und oben sowie der administrative Umgang mit Geheimprotestantismus in den österreichischen Erbländern” in Leeb et al., Geheimprotestantismus, 25–39.
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baptized their offspring in the Catholic rite, and attended processions “out of love and neighborliness, [not wanting] to aggrieve anyone.”55 The result was a kind of defensive condominium that held well into the mid-18th century. Until then, the blending of confessions behind a veneer of uniformity appears to have troubled only the agents of orthodoxy. Entrenched: The third type of multiconfessional regime could form when entrenched, local elites perceived a material interest in upholding the institutional status quo that outweighed both their own religious loyalties and the power of princes to impose uniformity. Here too the result was an informal multiconfessionality under the monoconfessional veneer, albeit for different reasons. In the Empire’s many ecclesiastical territories, for example, offices and prebends were typically distributed among a relatively small number of regional aristocratic families, who therefore had a stake in preserving the existing system of church governance.56 By the mid-16th century many, perhaps most, of these families had adopted some form of Protestant belief. But the Religious Peace of 1555 had fixed the status of these territories as Catholic. Rather than disrupt the status quo, nobles used their influence over cathedral chapters, secular administration, and territorial assemblies both to thwart pressure to conform in doctrine and to secure Protestants a measure of informal toleration.57 Such configurations of power and faith often had peculiar liturgical consequences. In order to collect their incomes, Lutheran members of the cathedral chapter in Minden, for example, took part in Catholic processions and the Mass.58 Occasionally they also won quasi-legal validation. In 1542, for example, an
55 Thus a refugee from Salzburg, explaining his motives in 1680; Rudolf Leeb, “Zwei Konfessionen in einem Tal: Vom Zusammenleben der Konfessionen im Alpenraum in der Zeit des ‘Geheimprotestantismus’ und zum Verständnis der Konfessionalisierung” in Rupert Kleiber and Hermann Hold (eds.), Impulse für eine religiöse Alltagsgeschichte des Donau-Alpen-Adria-Raumes (Vienna: 2005), 129–250, here 139. 56 Eike Wolgast, Hochstift und Reformation: Studien zur Geschichte der Reichskirche zwischen 1517 und 1648 (Stuttgart: 1995), 20–26. 57 See Bastian Gillner, “Freie Herren, Freie Religion: Der Adel des Oberstifts Münster zwischen konfessionellem Konflikt und staatlicher Verdichtung, 1500–1700,” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Westfälische-Wilhelms-Universität Münster, 2009); the contribution of Richard Ninness to this volume; and idem, Between Opposition and Collaboration: Nobles, Bishops, and the German Reformations in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg (1555–1619) (Leiden: forthcoming). 58 Johannes Heckel, Die evangelischen Dom- und Kollegiatstifter Preussens, insbesondere Brandenburg, Merseburg, Naumburg, Zeitz: Eine rechtsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Stuttgart: 1924), 111–112.
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ecclesiastical ordinance for the Imperial Abbacy of Fulda effectively legalized Lutheran observance without altering the territory’s confessional standing.59 In Paderborn, the Catholic cathedral chapter in 1590 entered a “territorial pact” with the overwhelmingly Protestant nobility and towns to establish a regime of de facto religious toleration, which held until 1603–1604.60 A similar convergence of interest coalesced in the Duchy of Silesia, a secular dependency of the Bohemian crown, where the Catholic bishop of Breslau, as president ex officio of the provincial diet, was dependent on a minimum of cooperation from the largely Protestant nobles and privileged towns.61 As a result there were no serious efforts to re-Catholicize the province until after 1600. A special subset of entrenched multiconfessionality formed in territories that were subject to two lords of different faiths—such as the Black Forest lordship of Prechtal, co-ruled by the count of Fürstenberg and margrave of Baden-Durlach, who appointed a Catholic and Lutheran minister, respectively, to the valley’s two churches.62 In such cases, the principle of cuius regio, eius religio often had the paradoxical effect of conferring de facto freedom of choice. Liminal: Yet another kind of coexistence took shape willy-nilly, at the limits of officially monoconfessional jurisdictions. In many parts of the Empire, the fragmentation of political authority was so extreme that non-conformists in one jurisdiction could easily worship among coreligionists in an adjacent territory. A Catholic dissenter living in the tiny imperial city of Aalen, say, had only to walk a short distance to attend Mass in Unterkochen, a parish within the imperial provostry of Ellwangen. Such arrangements were not confined, however, to the splintered political landscapes of Franconia, Swabia, or the Rhineland. The imperial counties of Ortenburg and Haag, for example, were Protestant islands in a Bavarian Catholic sea; from 1555 on, such enclaves were protected under the Religious Peace. “Liminal” plurality could also emerge without the protection of imperial law. In 1570, for example,
59 Johannes Merz, “Fulda” in Schindling and Ziegler, Territorien des Reiches, 4:128– 145, here 137–139. 60 On the Landesvereinigung of 1590, see Bastian Gillner, Unkatholischer Stiftsadel: Konfession und Politik des Adels im Fürstbistum Paderborn (1555–1618) (Münster: 2006), 95–111. 61 Alexander Schunka, “Protestanten in Schlesien im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert” in Rudolf Leeb et al., Geheimprotestantismus, 271–297, here 274–276. 62 Werner Thoma, Die Kirchenpolitik der Grafen von Fürstenberg im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Münster: 1963), 83–95.
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the Emperor Maximilian II granted religious freedom to the nobility of Lower Austria, which had the effect of creating protected confessional enclaves on the outskirts of Vienna. After Rudolf II forbade non-Catholic worship in the capital city, Viennese Protestants began “walking out” (Auslaufen) to worship on the nearby estate of Hernals.63 Similar processions could be found anywhere territorial boundaries placed a congenial church within reach. In the Empire’s northwestern corner, Calvinist subjects of the prince-bishop of Münster “walked out” to the Reformed county of Werth.64 The prince-bishop tried to stop it but without much success. Since 1588, Dutch Calvinists living in Lutheran Hamburg worshiped across the Elbe in Stade; despite a 1603 ban, resident Catholics marched to Altona, just beyond Hamburg’s walls to the east.65 Such boundary-crossings were liminal in the anthropological sense as well: the ritual act of “walking out” reinforced group cohesion by involving dissenters in the performance of their own marginalization. We must not assume, however, that all “walking out” was defiant. Auslaufen also enacted confessional hierarchies that every participant ratified by the simple act of marching along. By the same token, liminal regimes also enabled civic governments to integrate resident-alien immigrants whose religion otherwise made them “rebels.”66 Coequal: At the pinnacle of formalized coexistence was, of course, the legal recognition of two or more confessions within a single community or jurisdiction. In 1555, as we have seen, the Religious Peace made lawful the public exercise of religion according to the Augsburg Confession, alongside Roman Catholicism, in imperial cities where biconfessionality was already an established fact. A kind of coequality also existed in the Protestant imperial city of Regensburg, which was also the seat of four Catholic imperial establishments over which
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Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2007), 144–150. 64 David M. Luebke, “Customs of Confession: Managing Religious Diversity in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Westphalia” forthcoming in Louthan et al., Diversity and Dissent. 65 Joachim Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819 (Cambridge, UK: 1985), 48–49, 118–119. 66 Mark Häberlein, “Konfessionelle Grenzen, religiöse Minderheiten und Herrschaftspraxis in süddeutschen Städten und Territorien in der Frühen Neuzeit” in Ronald G. Asch and Dagmar Freist (eds.), Staatsbildung als kultureller Prozess: Strukturwandel und Legitimation von Herrschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne: 2005), 151–190.
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civic magistrates had no authority—the prince-bishopric of Regensburg, the Benedictine abbey of St. Emmeram, and two imperial convents. This solution usually operated by sequestration, so that each parish within a community remained a confessionally homogeneous element within the larger, plural whole. Often it was tied to powersharing arrangements, some of them imposed, others arrived at by negotiation and treaty. Although the Religious Peace set an important precedent, not all coequal regimes depended on imperial law or were limited to two faiths. The Treaties of Dortmund (1609) and Xanten (1614) established triconfessionality in the duchies of Jülich, Kleve, and Berg. In the margraviate of Upper Lusatia, similarly, a regime of formal biconfessionality between the Lutheran and Catholic confessions was established in conjunction with the Peace of Prague (1635).67 By the same token, not all coequal regimes were predicated on parochial sequestration. In Augsburg, Lutherans and Catholics in the parish of the Holy Cross shared parochial resources but worshipped in adjacent buildings, apparently without serious incident, until 1629.68 In the cathedrals of Wetzlar and Bautzen, coequality was handled by subdividing the church interior: Catholics got the choir, Lutherans the nave, and were separated by a rood screen.69 Such a sharing of sacred spaces and parochial goods was called a simultaneum, although that term did not enter the legal vocabulary until 1651.70 As in the imperial cities, these cohabitations involved powersharing, often with confessionally transgressive consequences. Thus the Catholic dean of the biconfessional cathedral in Halberstadt served ex officio as rector divinorum of the Lutheran service, while in Minden, a Lutheran dean supervised the Catholic Mass.71 Concentric: One final form of coexistence represented a capitulation to the inertia of belief. Anton Schindling observes that in any given region, the first campaign to achieve confessional homogeneity
67 Friedrich H. Baumgärtel, Die kirchlichen Zustände Bautzens im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Bautzen: 1889), 54–55. 68 Emily Fisher Gray, “Good Neighbors: Architecture and Confession in Augsburg’s Lutheran Church of the Holy Cross, 1525–1661” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2004). 69 Nottarp, “Zur communicatio cum haereticis,” 426. 70 Helmut Neumaier, “Simultaneum und Religionsfrieden im Alten Reich. Zu Phänomenologie und Typologie eines umkampften Rechtsinstituts,” Historisches Jahrbuch 128 (2008): 137–176, here 140–145. 71 Heckel, Die evangelischen Dom- und Kollegiatstifter, 111.
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typically stood the best chance of success; once in place, confessionalized identities proved difficult to budge.72 “Concentric” regimes often formed when a prince attempted to convert an already-confessionalized population. The Electorate of Brandenburg is paradigmatic: in 1613, Elector Johann Sigismund converted to Calvinism and attempted a second Reformation, but met with such fierce and broad-based opposition that the Reformed faith remained largely confined to the capital city of Berlin and the university in Frankfurt an der Oder.73 Reluctantly, Johann Sigismund was compelled to guarantee both churches, Lutheran and Reformed; pastors were instructed to “eschew and avoid all berating and abuse of other churches.” The principle of cuius regio, eius religio had yielded to the force of popular resistance. Transformations There is a grave risk in typologies such as this. Necessarily formulaic, they can obscure local peculiarities that to us may seem trivial, but to historical communities may have been crucial variations. So it is worth emphasizing that most of the Empire’s bi- or triconfessional regimes fell into more than one category; that few were tranquil; and that all of them changed shape over time. A regime that began as hybrid adaptation, say, might well transform over time into formal coequality, or it might be extinguished altogether. Not all transformations, moreover, were merely local. Taken together, these general types describe a fundamental shift, away from the blurry idiosyncrasy of the hybrid, subcutaneous and entrenched modes of coexistence and toward the enclosed confessional identities that characterized the liminal, coequal, and concentric regimes. The Peace of Westphalia accelerated this trend by reinforcing confessional boundaries and by rehabilitating institutions that had promoted the peaceful mediation of religious conflict. Both were achieved through parity. With respect to imperial institutions, the Peace of 1648 stipulated that the Imperial Diet would decide all matters concerning religion not by majority vote, but by “friendly agreement” between two
72
Schindling, “Konfessionalisierung und Grenzen von Konfessionalisierbarkeit,” 20–23. 73 Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia: 1994).
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confessional blocs, the corpus evangelicorum, composed of Lutheran and Reformed members, and the remaining Catholic estates, on the basis of “exact and mutual equality.”74 This was the so-called itio in partes, a deliberative procedure that completed the transformation of religious conflicts into questions of law.75 Similarly, all judgeships but two in the Imperial Chamber Court would be meted out equally to Protestant and Catholic candidates—a clause that codified the Protestants’ old demand for equality between the confessions in all the court’s operations.76 Just as important was an agreement to defuse religious conflict by freezing confessional boundaries in time and place. The Peace of 1648 guaranteed everyone the right to observe any lawful religion in private; but it made no such provision for public observance. Instead, churches and properties were distributed according to the “normative year” rule, which restored the status quo of 1 January 1624.77 Any lawful confession that had been exercised publicly on that date was to be restored to its former condition, and because the Peace also codified the de facto status of Reformed Protestantism as the Empire’s third lawful confession, the clause applied retroactively to them as well. All this further compromised the right of princes to establish religion: although the Peace confirmed this principle explicitly, the normative year rule contradicted it head on. Arriving at these provisions took years of fierce haggling. Part of the price was an exemption for the Habsburg lands, where the normative year would not apply. Nor was it applied to Protestant territories that Bavaria annexed and catholicized after 1621. But unlike the Peace of 1555, the 1648 treaty placed the Empire’s triconfessional convivium on a durable footing by establishing “irrefutable physical boundaries,” endorsed by imperial law, “in which each confession could continue
74
IPO Art. IV, § 1. Martin Heckel, “Itio in partes: Zur Religionsverfassung des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation,” Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 64 (1978): 180–308. 76 IPO Art. V, §§ 53–54. Additional articles (§§ 55–58) guaranteed parity in personnel and procedure at the second supreme judicial tribunal, the Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat) in Vienna. See Gabriele Haug-Moritz, “Kaisertum und Parität: Reichspolitik und Konfession nach dem Westfälischen Frieden,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 19 (1992): 445–482. 77 The authoritative study is Ralf-Peter Fuchs, Ein ‘Medium’ zum Frieden: Die Normaljahrsregel und die Beendigung des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Munich: 2009). 75
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to develop.”78 In several instances, this meant undoing confessionalizations that had occurred during the war. The prince-bishop of Würzburg, for example, was compelled to reestablish Protestant worship in several parishes that had been catholicized after 1624.79 For present purposes, the most important effect of the Peace of Westphalia was to formalize existing multiconfessional regimes. Thus the Peace reconfirmed the biconfessional arrangements in the Swabian imperial cities of Augsburg, Biberach, Dinkelsbühl, and Ravensburg and decreed that public offices should be distributed equally between the confessions.80 The peace also recognized a Lutheran congregation in the Rhenish town of Oppenheim, ratifying an informal multiconfessionality that had evolved there and transforming it into a coequal regime under the protection of imperial law.81 “Liminal” arrangements were normalized, too: for Lutherans in the Silesian towns of Schweidnitz, Jauer, and Glogau, for example, the treaty created new “peace churches” (Friedenskirchen) just beyond the city walls.82 The power-sharing arrangements that had arisen within ecclesiastical establishments were frozen, too: thus under the terms of a clause that ceded the prince-bishoprics of Minden, Halberstadt, and Magdeburg to Brandenburg, the Elector was obliged to preserve the existing confessional regimes in 11 collegiate churches and cathedral chapters.83 In Minden, the cathedral chapter was composed of 11 Catholic and seven Lutheran canons. Any canon was free to convert, but at the price of surrendering his seat and its incomes.84 Because confession now attached to places and things, moreover, dynastic conversions typically generated “concentric” regimes—and no more. These proliferated greatly after 1648. In 1786, the jurist 78
Schindling, “Neighbours,” 466. Walter Scherzer, “Die Augsburger Konfessionsverwandten des Hochstifts Würzburg nach dem Westfälischen Frieden,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Kirchengeschichte 49 (1980): 21–43. 80 IPO Art. V, §§ 3–8. 81 IPO Art. IV, § 19. See also Peter Zschunke, Konfession und Alltag in Oppenheim: Beiträge zur Geschichte von Bevölkerung und Gesellschaft einer gemischtkonfessionellen Kleinstadt in der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: 1984), 77–78; Laurent Jalabert, Catholiques et protestants sur la rive gauche du Rhin: Droits, confessions et coexistence religieuse de 1648 à 1789 (Brussels: 2009), 79–81. 82 IPO Art. V § 40. See also Joachim Bahlcke, “Religion und Politik in Schlesien: Konfessionspolitische Strukturen unter österreichischer und preußischer Herrschaft (1650–1800),” Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 134 (1998): 33–57. 83 IPO Art. XI §§ 4–11. 84 Heckel, Die evangelischen Dom- und Kollegiatstifter, 113–114. 79
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Johann Stephan Pütter toted up 42 imperial princes who had converted to Catholicism since the Peace of Westphalia. In most cases (Hannover, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Saxony, Württemberg, HessenKassel, Pfalz-Sulzbach) the converted prince made no serious attempt to impose the Roman faith.85 Some converts, such as Elector Friedrich August of Saxony (1694–1733) and Duke Karl Alexander of Württemberg (1733–1737), guaranteed the continuation of Protestant state churches. The great exception to this pattern proves the rule: in 1685, the Palatine Electorate fell to Johann Wilhelm von Pfalz-Neuburg, a Catholic, who promptly began applying pressure on his subjects to convert. Then in 1698, Johann Wilhelm used a clause in the Treaty of Rijswijk, which ended the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), to impose a simultaneum on 240 parishes in which Catholicism had been reintroduced during the period of French military occupation.86 Under pressure from Protestant princes, the Elector accepted a compromise that would undo the simultanea and distribute churches between the Reformed and Catholic faiths on a ratio of 5:2. When the process of implementation was complete, 130 churches remained simultaneous.87 This story is noteworthy for two reasons. One is simply that the conflict was diffused without resort to arms. There was plenty of religious tension after 1648, even outbursts of violence, but in almost every instance a general conflagration was averted. Public demonstrations of confessional affiliation continued to ignite controversy—as in 1712, when a Corpus Christi procession provoked a shootout in the biconfessional streets of Siegen.88 But in this case the result, as in almost all such clashes, was a paper war.89 Some of the credit for this goes to the corpus evangelicorum, which called attention to every 85 Johann Stephan Pütter, Historische Entwickelung der heutigen Staatsverfassung des Teutschen Reichs, vol. 2 (Göttingen: 1786), 336–341. 86 Jalabert, Catholiques et protestants, 209–238, 321–364. 87 Jalabert, Catholiques et protestants, 393–430; Paul Warmbrunn, “Von der Vorherrschaft der Reformierten Konfession zum Nebeneinander dreier Bekenntnisse: Reformierte, Lutheraner und Katholiken in Kurpfalz und Pfalz-Zweibrücken zwischen dem Westfälischen Frieden und dem Ende des Alten Reiches,” Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 134 (1998): 95–121. 88 Jürgen Luh, Unheiliges Römisches Reich: Der konfessionelle Gegensatz 1648 bis 1806 (Potsdam: 1995), 40; Andreas Kalipke, “‘Weitläuffigkeiten’ und ‘Bedencklichkeiten’: Die Behandlung konfessioneller Konflikte am Corpus Evangelicorum,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 35 (2008): 405–445, here 413–414. 89 One notable exception is the so-called “Cow War” (1651), a skirmish between Brandenburg and the Duchy of Jülich-Berg, sparked by disagreement over the proper implementation of the normative year rule; Fuchs, Ein ‘Medium’ zum Frieden, 318–326.
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perceived excess on the Catholic side while muffling aggression within the Protestant camp. No less important was the coequal balance of confessional power that its very existence symbolized.90 Any prince who violated the confessional status quo exposed his coreligionists to reprisals. Thus in 1719, Elector Karl III Philipp revoked his purge of Calvinist observance from Heidelberg’s simultaneous Church of the Holy Spirit when the Electors of Brandenburg and Hannover retaliated by closing Catholic churches in Celle and Minden.91 Second, the episode shows how state action tended to increase confessional heterogeneity. The cumulative effect of the Elector’s “Counter-Reformation” was to institutionalize plurality at the expense of an existing confessional monopoly. After 1648, a growing number of princes deliberately encouraged pluralization by granting religious minorities the right to worship publicly. The Margraves of BadenDurlach, for example, recruited Mennonite settlers and issued a series of city charters between 1670 and 1722 that conferred freedom of religion on Catholics and Calvinists.92 Imperial cities exhibited the same tendency. In Hamburg, for example, the Senate gradually established the Reformed church between 1685 and 1744.93 In most cases, these accommodations reflected the desire of princes and magistrates to overcome demographic losses suffered during the wars of the 17th century and to capitalize on the population movements those wars set in motion.94 Whatever the motivation, such privileges accomplished the legal and administrative integration of nonconformists within the larger communities they inhabited.95 These concessions also disrupted the old alliance between secular and religious authorities: almost everywhere, security for minorities was realized over objections from those who stood most to lose from any further pluralization, the guardians of religious orthodoxy.96
90
Kalipke, “Weitläuffigkeiten,” here 426–428. Pütter, Historische Entwickelung, vol. 2, 387–388. 92 Mark Häberlein and Michaela Schmölz-Häberlein, “Eighteenth-Century Mennonites in the Margraviate of Baden and Neighboring Territories,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 75 (2001): 471–492. 93 Whaley, Religious Toleration, 122–141. 94 Schindling, “Konfessionalisierung und Grenzen von Konfessionalisierbarkeit,” 36–39. 95 Häberlein, “Religöse Minderheiten,” 189. 96 Ronald G. Asch, “Religious Toleration, the Peace of Westphalia, and the German Territorial Estates,” Parliaments, Estates & Representation 20 (2000): 75–89. 91
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By the same token, state power seldom operated to impose monoconfessional regimes on landscapes that were already plural. Here again, the exception confirms the trend. In 1731–1732, the Archbishop of Salzburg, Leopold Anton von Firmian, of expelled some 20,000 rural Protestants from lands subject to his secular authority. The action set off a storm of controversy. But it did not ignite military confrontation, as it might well have done a century before. All sides acknowledged that the prince-archbishopric was formally monoconfessional already and that Firmian had acted within his rights under the Peace of Westphalia. Indeed, the corpus evangelicorum had pressed the archbishop to allow the emigration. At issue were the circumstances under which the nonconformists were obliged to depart. A solution emerged quickly, in February 1732, when King Friedrich Wilhelm invited the Salzburgers to settle in Prussian Lithuania.97 Once again, a potentially explosive controversy had been diffused. The elements of the post-Westphalian order that made it durable— its sharper confessional boundaries, its ability to smother religious violence, its more encapsulated denominational identities—all came at a price. As the fate of Salzburg’s hidden Protestants showed, “subcutaneous” regimes were particularly vulnerable to monarchs who were determined to extinguish them. Another casualty was the liturgical hybridity that had survived in certain regions well into the 17th century. The hybrid regime in Osnabrück, for example, made it impossible to determine after 1648 whether any particular parish had been Catholic or Lutheran during the normative year, 1624.98 In the end, an ad hoc imperial commission apportioned parishes on the basis of rough equality in goods and souls.99 Thus 28 parishes became exclusively Catholic in doctrine and liturgy; 17 became unambiguously
97 Mack Walker, The Salzburg Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca: 1992); and James Van Horn Melton, “Confessional Power and the Power of Confession” in Hamish C. Scott and Brendan Simms (eds.), Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: 2007), 133–157. 98 Fuchs, Ein Medium zum Frieden, 215–220; Theodor Penners, “Zur Konfessionsbildung im Fürstentum Osnabrück: Die ländliche Bevölkerung im Wechsel der Reformation des 17. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch für niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte 72 (1974): 51–105. 99 On this commission and its resolution, the so-called “Volmarscher Durchschlag,” see Fuchs, Medium zum Frieden, 218–219; and Wolfgang Seegrün, “In Münster und Nürnberg: Die Verteilung der Konfessionen im Fürstentum Osnabrück 1648/50,” Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 134 (1998): 59–94.
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Lutheran; and the remaining eight became “biparochial”—that is, two congregations, Catholic and Lutheran, shared the resources of a single parish, if not in all cases a single parish church.100 The Peace of Westphalia, in short, introduced sharp confessional distinctions where none had existed before. Judicialization exacted its price as well, in the form of long-winded and costly legal wrangling before imperial tribunals and at the Diet. In the Palatinate, several disputes sparked by Elector Johann Wilhelm’s “Counter-Reformation” of the 1680s were still generating supplications and remonstrances a century later.101 This was to be expected; part of the reason why judicialization was effective was that it attenuated religious conflicts. As Ronald G. Asch and others have argued, it also accentuated confessional differences and perpetuated them, which hindered the process of religion’s transformation from a status category into a private matter of the heart.102 By the same token, however, enclosed confessional identities did not rule out peaceable relations in everyday life. Away from the hubbub of processions and lawsuits, sharper confessional boundaries facilitated many kinds of peaceable interdependence. Étienne François argues that faith and occupation were so strongly aligned that each confession formed an autonomous cultural universe, separated by an “invisible boundary” from the rest.103 Even names marked confessional identity so obviously that everyone became a “slave of baptism.” Evidence of confessional endogamy seems to confirm this view: in triconfessional Oppenheim, marriages between Catholics and Protestants—which had been common in the late 16th century—became extremely rare, fewer than 5 percent in the 18th century.104 But the flip-side of confessional division was socio-economic symbiosis: in Augsburg, for example, the (almost exclusively Catholic) gardeners could not get by without the
100
The coinage “biparochial” (doppelpfarrig) comes from Hoberg, who used it to refer to biconfessional parishes that shared parochial resources, whether or not they worshipped in the same church; see his Gemeinschaft der Bekenntnisse, 13. Of the eight biparochial parishes, four contained two churches, one for each confession, while the other four were simultaneous. 101 [Gottlieb Jakob Planck] “Aktenstücke zu der Geschichte der neuesten Religionsbeschwerden in der Pfalz,” in idem (ed.), Neueste Religionsgeschichte, vol. 2 (Lemgo: 1790), 127–226. 102 Asch, “Religious Toleration,” 88–89. 103 Étienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806 (Sigmaringen: 1991). 104 Zschunke, Konfession und Alltag, 103–104.
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(almost exclusively Lutheran) butchers.105 Recognizing that most interaction between the confessions was not conflictual, magistrates sought to minimize those that were. As for interconfessional marriage, secular governments increasingly accepted the practice as inevitable and sought to regulate, rather than abolish it.106 Conclusion “Germany,” wrote Voltaire in his 1763 essay On Toleration, “would be a desert strewn with the bones of Catholics, Protestants, and Anabaptists, slain by each other, if the Peace of Westphalia had not at length brought freedom of conscience.”107 This was a misperception. More accurately, he might have quipped that freedom of conscience was a privilege claimed by princes on behalf of coreligionists subject to lords of a different faith. Nevertheless, his observation captured a fundamental difference: the Empire, unlike his native France, institutionalized confessional plurality and judicialized religious conflict to a degree seldom found anywhere else in western Europe. From 1555 on, the Empire was multiconfessional; until 1618 and after 1648, it also succeeded, for the most part, at keeping the peace. It was not a tolerant order, although many German princes would eventually embrace toleration as a principle of governance.108 Even so, the Empire achieved the ends of toleration, or many of them, without enshrining it as a guiding norm of social and political order. And this it accomplished long before 1763.
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François, Unsichtbare Grenze, 96–99. Dagmar Freist, “Zwischen Glaubensfreiheit und Gewissenszwang: Das Reichsrecht und der Umgang mit Menschen nach 1648” in Ronald G. Asch (ed.), Frieden und Krieg in der Frühen Neuzeit: Die europäische Staatenordnung und die außereuropäische Welt (Munich: 2001), 293–322. 107 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, “On Toleration, in Connection with the Death of Jean Calas” in Joseph McCabe (ed.), Toleration and Other Essays by Voltaire (New York: 1912), 1–87, here 26. 108 One of the first was Christian August, Count Palatine of Sulzback, (1622–1708); Volker Wappmann, Durchbruch zur Toleranz: Die Religionspolitik des Pfalzgrafen Christian August von Sulzbach (Neustadt a.d. Aisch: 1995). 106
PROTESTANT IMPERIAL KNIGHTS, MULTICONFESSIONALISM, AND THE COUNTER-REFORMATION Richard J. Ninness The German lower nobility is well-known for its role in the early Reformation. According to this narrative, in 1522, the knights led by Franz von Sickingen attacked the Arch Bishopric of Trier in a defiant act, supporting the Reformation.1 After Sickingen’s death in 1523, ending the Knights’ Revolt, they supposedly retreated from the stage of the Reformation into irrelevance. Sickingen’s invasion of Trier only involved a minority of the knights and was definitely not the last gasp of a quixotic group. True, the 1520s were a tough decade for these small independent lords found in Franconia, Swabia, and in the Rhineland of the Holy Roman Empire, and it looked as if territorial princes would absorb their lands and domesticate them into their subjects. That, however, did not happen. After the Knights’ Revolt, the knights saved themselves from becoming the subjects of the princes, not by feuding, but by organizing themselves collectively and accepting the emperor as their patron: the knights became imperial knights.2 As imperial knights, they were 1
Examples are William Hitchcock, The Background of the Knights’ Revolt 1522–1523 (Berkeley: 1958) and Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: 1991). Victor Thiessen in his dissertation, “The Nobles’ Reformation: The Reception and Adaptation of Reformation Ideas in the Pamphlets of Noble Writers from 1520–1530” (PhD diss., Kingston, Queen’s University, 1998) discusses this approach to the knights in the historiography of the Reformation. 2 The imperial knights have received almost no attention in English language literature and a few words of explanation are in order. They were lower nobles, recognized by the emperor as his clients. In the early-16th century, as the ecclesiastical principalities confronted the Reformation, knights in Swabia, Franconia, and the Rhineland maintained their independence against aggressive princes by organizing themselves into groups with the support of Charles V and his brother, Ferdinand I. In return, the imperial knights paid the emperor contributions. Without representation at the imperial diet, the imperial knights depended on the emperor as their advocate. As clients, they could at best expect occasional privileges and support from the Habsburgs. As virtually independent suzerains in their own right, albeit on a much smaller scale than princes, the imperial knights made up for their individual weakness by cooperating as a group. The imperial knighthood consisted of three circles: Swabia, Franconia, and the Rhineland. Within each circle they were divided into districts called cantons. Volker Press, Kaiser Karl V., König Ferdinand und die Entstehung der Reichsritterschaft
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able to play a larger role in the religious struggles beyond the 1520s, especially for Catholic princes. Through their talent for organization, they came to dominate many of the most important ecclesiastical principalities in the imperial church: Trier on the Mosel, Mainz at the confluence of the Rhine and Main rivers, farther south in Worms and Speyer, and farther east on the Main in Würzburg and Bamberg. They were also influential in the Prince-Bishoprics of Augsburg and Eichstätt. Thus, the imperial knights carved positions of leadership for themselves in some of the most important centers of the CounterReformation.3 These Catholic ecclesiastical principalities did things that we would associate with the Counter-Reformation. They fought to protect the Ecclesiastical Reservation, started to forcibly convert Protestant subjects to Catholicism in the late-16th century, joined the Catholic League in the early-17th century, and were vociferous proponents of the measures later proclaimed in the Edict of Restitution in 1629. But the imperial knights were a heterogeneous group of Lutherans and Catholics. They saw the imperial church as an important source of patronage for their members and thus worthy of support, but the Peace of Augsburg recognized their right to choose either Catholicism or Lutheranism. Who were these imperial knights, who could relive the glory of their family just by visiting a cathedral and be Protestant at the same time? Their greatest ancestors had served as bishops and were buried in cathedrals with the family’s heraldic devices on their memorials. Imperial knights knew how crucial ecclesiastical principalities were for
(Wiesbaden: 1976); idem, “Reichsritterschaften” in Kurt G.A. Jeserich, Hans Pohl, and Georg-Christoph von Unruh (eds.), Deutsche Verwaltungsgeschichte. Vom Spätmittelalter bis zum Ende des Reiches, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: 1983), 679–689. 3 In Trent and All That, O’Malley asks what’s in a name, and then in his conclusion titled “There’s Much in a Name” argues for Early Modern Catholicism. John O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA: 2000). Many terms exist for the activities of the Catholics in the period covered in this essay such as Catholic Reform, Catholic Renewal, Catholic Reformation, Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation, or Early Modern Catholicism, but I still favor the use of Counter-Reformation even if, as O’Malley argues, that it conveys a certain impression that is false. For one reason, the term is the best known. Furthermore, much of this study deals with religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic authorities wanted their subjects to be Catholic, but ecclesiastical principalities had to deal with Lutheran members from imperial knightly families, their Lutheran subjects, and Lutheran imperial knightly churches. For a discussion of the Counter-Reformation see David Luebke (ed.), The Counter-Reformation (Malden, MA: 1999), 1–16.
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them, and some of the staunchest Catholic reformers emerged from their ranks, yet in the main they chose the Lutheran faith for themselves and their lands. Structural arrangements, the bond of family, and imperial knightly status made Protestant involvement in an ecclesiastical principality possible. Over the course of the 16th century an uneasy coexistence existed across confessional boundaries, despite the fault lines caused by multiconfessionalism, between a prelate’s wish for confessional conformity and the presence of Protestant imperial knights in his lands, between episcopal authority and imperial knightly churches, and between Catholic and Protestant members of the imperial knighthood. Within ecclesiastical principalities, Catholic prelates and canons could come from Protestant families, but they had to be Catholic. Protestant imperial knights even served as officials. Along with family ties, political cooperation helped to bridge confessional differences. Among its members, the imperial knighthood proclaimed a policy of religious toleration. In one of the great issues dividing Protestants and Catholics, the imperial knighthood joined the Catholic side in support of the Ecclesiastical Reservation. Imperial knights both experienced and managed the growing stress in the relations between ecclesiastical principalities, attempting to strengthen Catholicism within their realms, and the small independent enclaves of Protestantism on their estates. Leaders in the Catholic League tried to find a way for the mostly Protestant imperial knighthood to work with the Catholic camp. Under these circumstances, simple interpretations of the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants fail to capture the complexity of Catholic ecclesiastical politics. Imperial knights and their involvement with ecclesiastical principalities have to be understood in the context of their multiconfessional world where religion, status, and family intersected in ways that transcended the limits imposed by any single confession. An ecclesiastical principality in the Holy Roman Empire was a territorial state ruled by an ecclesiastical prince, be he archbishop, bishop, or abbot. It was often, but neither always nor necessarily, coextensive with the prince’s archdiocese, diocese, or foundation. These ecclesiastical principalities functioned like an aristocratic republic.4 An increasingly
4 Walther used this notion of an Adelsrepublik for Fulda. Gerrit Walther, Abt Balthasars Mission. Politische Mentalitäten, Gegenreformation und eine Adelsverschörung im Hochstift Fulda (Göttingen: 2002), 130. Jendorff sees this as an accurate way to describe circumstances in Mainz. Alexander Jendorff, Verwandte, Teilhaber und
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exclusive and autonomous network of noble families that also managed to establish themselves as members of the imperial knighthood brought these ecclesiastical principalities under their sway by controlling the cathedral chapters or foundations. Their influence over the chapter was not the result of any special religious calling.5 Erasmus’s observation that Jesus himself would not have been accepted into a cathedral chapter exactly captured their narrow admittance practices.6 Canons were closely involved in the practice of patronage. The chapters advocated the hiring of important secular officials based on family connections. They also elected the prince-bishop or archbishop from among their own members, again based on kinship ties. Being elected prince-bishop raised a canon to the status of an imperial prince. In the cases of Trier and Mainz, the archbishop had a vote in the college of electors, seven princes, responsible for electing the emperor. But the new leader of an ecclesiastical principality governed with the chapter’s consent, swearing a Wahlkapitulation that set as a requirement the chapter’s approval for everything from the smallest expenditures of money to the most significant political decisions. Imperial knights not only occupied positions within the chapters, but also filled the most important secular offices of the ecclesiastical principalities, thus increasing their influence. This system created a group of individuals, regardless of their confessional affiliation, interested in the preservation of the imperial church and ready to support it in a time of crisis. The Reformation complicated this relationship, however. During the first half of the 16th century, we can note a certain religious ambivalence among the imperial knights, even though they remained influential governing partners in many ecclesiastical principalities.7 Sympathy for reform existed within their ranks, but their
Dienstleute. Herrschaftliche Funktionsträger im Erzstift Mainz 1514 bis 1647 (Marburg: 2003), 81. 5 For general information on the early modern German cathedral chapter see Günter Christ, “Selbstverständnis und Rolle der Domkapitel in den geistlichen Territorien des alten Deutschen Reiches der Frühneuzeit,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 16 (1989): 257–328. 6 Gerhard Fouquet, Speyerer Domkapitel im späten Mittelatler, vol. 1 (Mainz: 1987), 4. 7 Press and Bauer provide good summaries of the imperial knightly attitude towards the Reformation. Volker Press, “Adel, Reich und Reformation,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen (ed.), Stadtbürgertum und Adel in der Reformation. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der Reformation in England und Deutschland (Stuttgart: 1979), 330–383. Christoph Bauer, “Reichsritterschaft in Franken,” in Anton Schindling and Walter
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political situation limited their religious options. They were not the subjects of any prince, but they were not an imperial estate, and they supported the imperial church because of its patronage opportunities. Their religious status was finally addressed in the Peace of Augsburg (1555), along with the status of the imperial church which was so important for them. At Augsburg, King Ferdinand I resisted their inclusion in the Religious Peace, but their status demanded a resolution.8 Only in the last stage of the negotiations, from September 1 to September 8, 1555, did Ferdinand agree to recognize the imperial knights in the accord.9 Article 26 of the Peace of Augsburg mandates that “the free order of knights, who are directly subjected to his imperial majesty and to ourselves, should be included in such a peace, in such a form that they should not be forced, constrained, nor burdened by any person in the matter of both aforementioned religions [Catholicism or Lutheranism].”10 The imperial knights found themselves in a variety of situations and roles that had the potential of being confessionally charged. As lords in their own lands, they dealt with their subjects and struggled against powerful princes, were members of the imperial knighthood that included both Catholics and Protestants, and had a Catholic emperor as their patron. Because of their ties to the imperial church, they might serve an official to or receive fiefs from Catholic princes, despite the
Ziegler (eds.), Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung. Land und Konfession 1500–1650, vol. 4 (Münster: 1992), 191–206. For further information on how the early Reformation message appealed to the lower nobility across the Holy Roman Empire and specifically to the imperial knights, see Thiessen, “The Nobles’ Reformation.” 8 Initially the Protestant members of the Council of Princes (Fürstenrat) and the three Protestant electors wanted to include both the imperial knights and the nobles who were subjects of princes in the Religious Peace. Haus, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Reichskanzlei-Reichstagsakten, Faz. 29b, 50–50’; Haus, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, MEARTA, Faz. 37, vol. 2, fol. 154–154’; Haus, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Wien, MEA-RTA, Faz. 39, vol. 1. 9 Haus, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Reichskanzlei-Reichstagsakten, Faz. 29b, fol. 44’, 57’. Karl Brandi, Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden vom 25. September 1555 (Göttingen: 1927), 48–49. The nobles who were the subjects of princes were included in the Declaratio Ferdinandea from September 24, 1555. 10 “in solchem Frieden sollen die freyen Ritterschaft, welche ohne Mittel der Kayserl. Majest. und Uns unterworffen, auch begriffen seyn, also und dergestalt, daß sie obbemeldter beedet Religion halben auch von niemand vergewaltigt, beträngt noch beschwert sollen werden.” Hanns Hubert Hofmann (ed.), Quellen zum Verfassungsorganismus des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation 1495–1815 (Darmstadt, 1976), 105.
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fact that they were Protestant. Recognition in the Peace of Augsburg allowed the imperial knights to navigate possible confessional pitfalls arising from these situations. Despite the popularity of Lutheranism among imperial knights, the Peace allowed them to remain stakeholders in Catholic ecclesiastical principalities. A prelate could not confiscate their lands or force them to emigrate because of their confession, and prelates never challenged the right of imperial knights to choose between Catholicism or Lutheranism for themselves, not even during the Thirty Years War. A conversation between Prince-Bishop of Würzburg Melchior Zobel von Giebelstadt and the imperial knights at the end of September 1555 provides an instructive example of a prelate’s reaction to the Peace. The knights admonished the prince-bishop “to do no injury in their estates because of religion.”11 He responded with the wish that “they recognized the truth and not allow themselves to be so easily lured from the right path by people opposed to our right, true religion, but instead remain in the teachings and tradition of all our ancestors.”12 The prince-bishop declared that he was bound by the decision of the imperial diet at Augsburg, indicating his respect for imperial law, but still observed that the issue of religion boded evilly for the German nation. Despite Prince-Bishop Melchior Zobel von Giebelstadt’s efforts to work with the imperial knights, he was killed a few years after the Peace of Augsburg in 1558, in a feud led by the imperial knight, Wilhelm von Grumbach. The feud did not result from a challenge to Grumbach’s Lutheran confession. Rather, his feud against Würzburg points to longstanding conflicts between knights and a prelate that could arise over a variety of issues. Bad blood had existed between the two men before Melchior Zobel’s election. Then, as prince-bishop, Zobel deprived Grumbach of his office as marshal. Despite the importance of ecclesiastical states and offices for the imperial knights, competition over available patronage, status, or other issues led to personal and familial grudges, based on slights both real and imagined. Con-
11 Staatsarchiv Würzburg (StAW), Standbuch 951, fol. 96. “jn jrenn gebiettem der religion halbenn keinen einntrags zuthunn”. 12 StAW, Standbuch 951, fol. 96. “sie erkannttenn denn grundt der warheit vnd liessen sich nit so leichtlich vonn leuthenn vnser rechtenn waren relligion zuwider vonn dem rechtenn wege verfueren vnnd abwendig machenn, sonder pliebenn bey der leer vnnd tradition vnnserer aller alter voreltern.”
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fessional conflicts exacerbated these problems, but did not create or replace them. After their recognition in the Peace of Augsburg, the imperial knights created an intricate world that included Lutheranism for many of their members alongside their support for the Catholic imperial church. Historians estimate that Lutheranism became the dominant, though never exclusive, confession of the imperial knights in Franconia, Rhineland, and in Swabia, with the cantons of Hegau and Donau in Swabia remaining more Catholic.13 Imperial knightly families also began to claim the ius reformandi in their domains. In the late-16th century, this resulted in disputes between the imperial knights and the very ecclesiastical principalities that provided them office and advancement. Prince-Bishops claimed that the Peace did not expressly give the imperial knights this right, because they were not princes or imperial estates. The ius reformandi provided imperial knights with greater control of their estates. By choosing Protestantism and thus freeing their lands from diocesan authority, they could organize the religious life of their subjects and the resources of their churches as never before. Thus, the ius reformandi gave their lordship a new sacral quality. Despite the variety of tensions—the emperor as overlord, princebishops as neighbors and employers, and the evangelical convictions that beset them—the imperial knights maintained close ties to local ecclesiastical principalities. Their control of offices in several of them cemented their interest and participation. If a particular dynasty had historically dominated an ecclesiastical principality, then the principality invariably took on the confession of that dynasty during the 13 Volker Press, “Die Reichsritterschaft im Reich der früheren Neuzeit,” Nassauische Annalen 87 (1976): 111–112. For Swabia see Volker Press, “Die Ritterschaft im Kraichgau zwischen Reich und Territorium 1500–1623,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 122 (1974): 44–45; Thomas Schulz, Der Kanton Kocher der Schwäbischen Reichsritterschaft 1542–1805. Entstehung, Geschichte, Verfassung und Mitgliederstruktur eines korporativen Adelsverbandes im System des alten Reiches (Esslingen am Neckar: 1986), 185. For Franconia see Helmut Neumaier, “Daß wir kein anderes Haupt oder von Gott eingesetzte zeitliche Obrigkeit haben.” Ort Odenwald der fränkischen Reichsritterschaft von den Anfängen bis zum Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Stuttgart: 2005), 131–133. For the Rhineland, see Alexander Jendorff, Reformatio catholica. Gesellschaftliche Handlungsspielräume kirchlichen Wandels im Erzstift Mainz: 1514– 1630 (Münster: 2000), 289–298. These estimates do not involve any statistical analysis, which for the imperial knights would be a daunting task because of the fluidity between confessions and the number of individuals and churches involved. It is also a problem because of the sources.
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Reformation.14 By 1618, of the 43 ecclesiastical principalities in the Holy Roman Empire that participated in the imperial diet and paid taxes, 16 had become Lutheran.15 Whereas Bavaria helped stabilize Catholicism in the southwestern part of the Empire and later in Westphalia, the imperial knights stabilized Catholicism in the central part of the Empire. Lutheran knights showed no interest in converting or subverting Catholic prince-bishoprics, but the work of the imperial knights in maintaining the status quo in an ecclesiastical principality was not enough for Rome. After the conclusion of the Council of Trent in 1563, the imperial church came under closer scrutiny from the papacy through nuncios and legates who collected information, reported regularly to Rome, worked as diplomats, and urged the German episcopate to greater orthodoxy.16 By the 1570s, Rome exerted pressure on ecclesiastical principalities to improve the care of souls, especially through the establishment of a seminary in each diocese. Prelates and canons were likewise expected to adopt the new spirit of reform by taking their religious vocation seriously. Rome encouraged cathedral chapters to elect reform-minded prelates. Gradually, the imperial knights involved in ecclesiastical principalities had to negotiate between the demands of an aggressive Tridentine Catholicism and the dictates of family, custom, and conscience. They worked to secure their dominance by excluding non-imperial knights from the cathedral chapters and preventing their election as bishops, resulting in complaints about their controversial patronage practices. In 1575, Westphalian nobles complained about their exclusion from the cathedral chapter in
14 Of the great dynasties in the Empire, only the Wittelsbachs and Habsburgs remained Catholic. Those ecclesiastical principalities surrounded by Bavarian territory, such as Regensburg and Freising, were dominated by Bavarian nobles, and those surrounded by Austrian territory, such as Salzburg and Brixen, were dominated by Austrian nobles. Walter Ziegler, “Die Hochstifte des Reiches im konfessionellen Zeitalter 1520–1618,” Römische Quartalschrift 87 (1992): 259. Conversely, those ecclesiastical principalities dominated by the Wettins of Saxony such as Merseburg, Naumburg, and Meißen, and by the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg such as the Archbishopric of Magdeburg, became Protestant. Ibid., 273. 15 Ziegler, “Hochstifte,” 255, 262. 16 Krasenbrink devotes a book to this subject. Josef Krasenbrink, Die Congregatio Germanica und die katholische Reform in Deutschland nach dem Tridentium (Münster: 1972). That the prince-bishops of the period did not correspond to expectations set by the Council of Trent was raised by Ziegler, “Hochstifte,” 59.
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Mainz.17 Along with the Westphalian nobles, the imperial counts complained about the patronage practices of imperial knights in ecclesiastical principalities that were subject to the Ecclesiastical Reservation which obliged a prelate to resign if he converted to Protestantism.18 In 1576, the imperial knights informed the emperor of their support for the Catholic position of maintaining the Ecclesiastical Reservation, because, from their view, it helped keep unwanted competitors from church office.19 Beginning in the 1570s, young imperial knights, who were enthusiastic about reform, began to rise in the ranks of the Church. This new generation saw itself as taking part in an exciting movement, and through their activism, they distinguished themselves from their predecessors, who viewed their roles more as administrators. The conclusion of the Council of Trent and the coming of the Jesuits were vital for this enthusiasm.20 Jesuits at universities such as Cologne, Ingolstadt, and later Würzburg educated young members of the cathedral chapter in the spirit of Tridentine Catholicism. A decade before the completion of the Council of Trent, the foundation of the Collegium Germanicum (1552) in Rome was already educating the elite of the imperial church in the spirit of Catholic reform.21 This new Catholic reform culture envisioned the ideal prelate as a strong temporal and spiritual leader. In the Holy Roman Empire, Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, who served as the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg from 1573–1617 and stemmed from a prominent imperial knightly family, embodied these 17 A. L. Veit, “Geschichte und Recht der Stiftmässigkeit auf die ehemals adeligen Domstifte von Mainz, Würzburg und Bamberg,” Historisches Jahrbuch 33 (1912): 342–348; Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Wien, Mainzer Erzkanzlerarchiv, GKS, Faz. 53a, no. 1. 18 Andreas Edel, Der Kaiser und Kurpfalz. Eine Studie zu den Grundelementen politischen Handelns bei Maximilian II. (1564–1576) (Göttingen: 1997), 424–427. 19 In 1576, the imperial knights wrote to the emperor that “solche gesuchte freystellung so zu sonderlichen nachteil vnd vndergang der stifft vnnd adels gelangen thuet genzlich einstellen vnnd alles bey alten herkommen vnd dem vffrechten religionfrieden aller gnedigst bleiben zu lassen.” Staatsarchiv Darmstadt, F2, no. 143, fol. 386. Also see Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv Wien, Reichshofrat RHR—Protokoll 16. Jh./ Bd. 42b, fol. 71–71’. 20 Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (Cambridge, UK: 1998), 77. An illustrative example is in the Archbishopric of Mainz. In 1561 after Elector Daniel von Homburg heard Peter Canisius preach to the imperial diet in Augsburg, he summoned the Jesuits to teach at the university. Anton Ph. Brück “Das Erzstift Mainz und das Tridentinum” in Georg Schreiber (ed.), Das Weltkonzil von Trient, vol. 2 (Freiburg: 1951), 216–217. 21 Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 113f.
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ideals. He brought the Jesuits to Würzburg, refounded the university there, and enforced conversion of his subjects to Catholicism. Imperial knights combined aggressive Catholicism with their family interests, but this combination created tensions within the older aristocratic culture of ecclesiastical principalities. As with ecclesiastical offices, many important secular officials were drawn from the ranks of imperial knights, who saw service in an ecclesiastical principality as a birthright separate from their zeal for a particular confession. The territory of an ecclesiastical principality was divided into administrative districts (Ämter) run by regional governors (Amtmänner). The regional governors were often nobles. Furthermore, at court, the prelate had a group of temporal councilors and palace officials, most of whom were imperial knights. These positions did not go to clerics, except in the case of the prince-bishop’s separate church council, which consisted of non-noble clergymen. The master of the household (Hofmeister) was the highest court functionary. He supervised a prelate’s council and the administration of the ecclesiastical principality. Because bishops and canons filled administrative offices with their relatives, important secular officials could be Lutheran. Furthermore, given the tendency of secular and religious officials to appoint relatives to administrative positions, thus promoting family interests, important secular officials of Catholic prince-bishoprics were themselves often Lutheran. In the early-16th century, ecclesiastical princes did not have a problem employing Lutherans, but by the 1570s, Catholic rulers started to look for Catholic officials. They often had problems finding them, because so many of the imperial knights were Lutheran. A prominent example is Hartmut von Kronberg, the master of the household in Mainz from 1571 until his death in 1592.22 Hartmut’s father fought on the side of Sickingen in the Knights’ Revolt, but this support did not prevent his Lutheran son from pursuing a successful career in the Electorate and Prince-Archbishopric of Mainz. Hartmut married Elector Martin Brendel von Homburg’s sister in 1570, and was appointed master of the household in Mainz the following year. Hartmut’s son, Johann Schweikard von Kronberg, despite the confession of his father, entered the cathedral chapter and was educated in the Collegium Ger-
22 Alexander Jendorff, “Der Mainzer Hofmeister Hartmut (XIII.) von Kronberg (1517–1591)” in Michael Kaiser (ed.), Der zweite Mann im Staat (Berlin: 2003), 39–57.
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manicum. His son was elected elector and prince-archbishop of Mainz in 1604, one of the new generation of reform-minded prelates. All of his Lutheran brothers served nonetheless as regional governors in Mainz during his tenure.23 Bamberg and Würzburg also had trouble finding Catholic imperial knights to be masters of the household. From the 1570s to 1600, Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn sporadically filled the office with a variety of figures: a Catholic foreigner, Catholic imperial knights, a Lutheran imperial knight, a count, and finally a Lutheran baron.24 After 1600, he left the office vacant. On the election of Ernst von Mengersdorf as prince-bishop of Bamberg in 1584, the office of master of the household had been vacant since the death of the Catholic Wolf Dietrich von Wiesenthau in 1580.25 The cathedral chapter wanted a new master of the household, but Ernst demanded that the office be held by a Catholic. After the cathedral chapter admitted that they did not have any Catholic candidates, Ernst suggested Hans Christian von Hornstein, who was also an official in the neighboring Prince-Bishopric of Würzburg.26 The cathedral chapter doubted that Bamberg could get Hornstein, since he could not serve two princes and his salary would be too high. It suggested that the prince-bishop look for people who, “were attached to the prince-bishopric and knew its affairs. They should be kept in mind whether they were Catholic or not.”27 Despite its agreement in principle to hiring a Catholic master of the household, the cathedral chapter nominated three Lutheran imperial knights.28 None of these candidates pleased the prince-bishop, so the position remained vacant.
23 Jendorff, Verwandte, Teilhaber und Dienstleute, 236–238: idem, Reformatio Catholica, 252–253; Wolfgang Ronner, Politik und Religion im alten Kronberg (Kronberg: 1983); idem, Die von Kronberg und ihre Frauen. Begegnungen mit einem Rittergeschlecht (Neustadt a. d. Aisch: 1992). 24 By using Heinzjürgen Reuschling, Die Regierung des Hochstifts Würzburg 1495– 1642. Zentralbehörden und führende Gruppen eines geistlichen Staates (Würzburg: 1984), it is possible to determine who the masters of the household were in Würzburg during this period. 25 Staatsarchiv Bamberg (StAB), B 86, no. 17, fol. 209’. 26 StAB, B 86, no. 16, fol. 80, 81’, 82–82’, 84’, 84, 85, 104–104’. Regarding von Hornstein, see Reuschling, Regierung des Hochstifts Würzburg, 310f., 131 fn. 81. 27 StAB, B 86, no. 17, fol. 39’, 40. “so dem stiefft zugewantt vnd dessen gelegenheit wüsten. Sie weren gleich der catholischen religon oder nit, möchten bedacht sein.” 28 StAB, B 86, no. 17, fol. 40’.
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In Bamberg, Ernst von Mengersdorf wanted to deal with the problem of a pool of local Protestant talent by hiring foreigners. The cathedral chapter approved of hiring a Catholic master of the household, if a suitable candidate could be found, but they were frightened by the prospect of replacing local councilors with foreigners. For the cathedral chapter, Catholic foreigners meant losing the goodwill of the local nobles: “[I]f, however, instead of other secular councilors who are not Catholic, foreigners are accepted, and if something should happen in the prince-bishopric, one would see what the same people would do and contribute and that in contrast the nobility sitting in the princebishopric, in as far as they are needed, would also withdraw their support.”29 Moreover, “[the prince-bishop] should not eliminate the nobles and other councilors who were not Catholic but would want to act in such a way that he had as many Catholics as Lutherans, so that when religious matters came up in this case the votes should be equal; he would also want to see whether he could get a chancellor from nearby and especially a Catholic.”30 Ernst von Mengersdorf died in 1591 without appointing a master of the household. His successor, Neithard von Thüngen, also tried to get a master of the household who was Catholic, and even compromised in 1594 by offering the office to a moderate Lutheran, Lorenz von Guttenberg, who refused. The office was never filled. Support for the Ecclesiastical Reservation and kinship to high-ranking prelates did not, however, guarantee continued cordial relations among the Holy See, the imperial church, and the imperial knights. In the late-16th century, a new generation of reform-minded prelates wanted uniformly Catholic subjects and officials and, on occasion, opposed the local Protestant churches that the imperial knights established on their own estates according to their ius reformandi. If a
29
StAB, B 86, no. 18, fol. 304. “Do aber anstatt der andern weltlichen räth, so nicht catholisch, auslendische genomen werdenn, vnd sich im stifft was zutragen sollte, würde mahnn sehenn, was die selben dabey thun vnd zu setzen, vnd daz hergegen die im stifft geseßene vom adel, so sowol als sie zu gebrauchen, ihre hülfliche hand auch abziehen würden.” 30 StAB, B 86, no. 18, fol. 309’f. “das sie die vom adell, oder andere räth, so nicht catholisch gahr abschaffen, sondern allein dahin handlen wollten, das sie souil catholische als euangelsiche hetten, damit wann in religionssachen was fürfiell, das dannost die vota paria wehren, wölten auch sehen, ob sies in der nehe hierumb vnd sönderlich einen catholischen cantzler bekommen könten.” Gertrud Wurm, “Bischöfe und Kapitel im Hochstift Bamberg und die Gegenreformation” (Ph.D. diss., University of Erlangen, 1945), 39.
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prince-bishop wanted to carry out Counter-Reformation policies, he not only had to oppose Protestantism in his own ecclesiastical principality, but also challenge the imperial knights, who might be friends, advisers, or even members of his own extended family, by challenging their role as lords with the right to decide the confession of their subjects. In pursuing their interests as local lords, the imperial knights crippled efforts to make an ecclesiastical principality into a contiguous territorial state with uniform religious observance. Their petty domains formed small independent enclaves of Protestantism in the midst of a prince-bishopric. Even subjects in Catholic localities could avoid Catholicism by going to the Protestant church in a neighboring imperial knightly village. These types of problems could even lead to coordinated action. In early 1594, the prince-bishop of Würzburg ordered the Lutheran pastor of Zell to leave. When the pastor refused, because his church was under the protection of an imperial knightly family, the Truchseß von Wetzhausen, who claimed the ius reformandi, the prince-bishop turned to his colleague in Bamberg for help, since the church lay on Bamberg’s western border between the two states. Prince-bishop Neithard von Thüngen agreed, and on March 3, 1594, forces from Bamberg and Würzburg expelled the pastor.31 In response to the attack on their church, the Truchseß family contacted the Franconian imperial knighthood, who happened to be meeting in Bamberg, to request assistance. On March 20, 1594, the knights complained to the cathedral chapter and asked it to intercede on their behalf with the princebishop.32 Demonstrating their connections in the cathedral chapter, the imperial knights addressed the canons as their cousins, uncles, and brothers-in-law. They claimed that the Truchseß had the right to choose their pastor, a right exercised by their forefathers in accordance with the Peace of Passau and the Peace of Augsburg. They condemned the prince-bishop’s actions as violating the clear letter of the Religious Peace. In June 1594, the cathedral chapter reported to Neithard that the imperial knights wished its mediation to negotiate a solution to
31 StAB, B 49, no. 231, November 16, 1596, March 20, 1594; StAB, Hochstift Bamberg Neuverzeichnis Akten, no. 598, March 20, 1594. 32 Georg Zagel, Die Gegenreformation im Bistum Bamberg unter Fürstbischof Neithard von Thüngen 1591–98 (Bayreuth: 1900), 76–77; Wurm, “Bischöfe,” 51, Johann Looshorn, Das Bisthum Bamberg von 1556–1622, vol. 5 (Bamberg: 1903), 231, 243; StAB, J 3, 224a.
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these differences with the prince-bishop. Protests and offers of mediation aside, the prince-bishop ordered the expulsion of another pastor in June, leading the Giech family to protest to the cathedral chapter that it had been appointing the pastor in its village of Buchau “since time immemorial”. And that was the problem.33 More and more, Neithard and the imperial knights were talking past each other. The imperial knights spoke about the old days and tradition. By adopting the aggressive policies of the Counter-Reformation, Neithard, like other prelates, created for himself a new role, in which the power of the prince-bishop limited the influence of the cathedral chapter and the imperial knights. Although tension existed because of the clash of aggressive Catholicism with their right to reform, the imperial knights still came together. In the same month of June, 1594, the Catholic Hans Veit von Würtzburg resigned from the cathedral chapter in order to marry a Lutheran. His wedding was a huge celebration, and the prince-bishops from the area were represented.34 The newly-married couple received gifts from the prince-bishops of Franconia, Bamberg, Eichstätt, and Würzburg. This wedding was probably one of the greatest events in Franconia of that summer. A receipt has come down to us showing that enough fodder for 334 horses was provided for those who traveled to the festivities.35 The cathedral chapter of Bamberg even failed to meet from June 14–17 because most of the canons were in attendance at the wedding. The imperial knights conducted themselves according to rules of behavior dictated by family, friendship, and association. That a gift was sent by the prince-bishop of Würzburg to the confessionally mixed pair is especially remarkable, since the prince-bishop at that time was the arch counter-reformer Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn. Thus, even in the closing decade of the 16th century, a marriage celebrating the status and familial ties of imperial knights throughout the region was not significantly affected by any rift caused by confessional differences.
33
StAB, B 86, no. 20, fol. 381’. StAB, G 58, F II, 10; Wilhelm Hotzelt, Familiengeschichte der Freiherren von Würtzburg (Freiburg am Breisgau: 1931), 406–410; Klaus Rupprecht, Adelige Familie in Franken. Zeugnisse für Familien- und Standesbewußtsein aus dem Schloßarchiv Mitwitz (Bamberg: 1998), 14f. 35 StAB, Schloßarchiv Mitwitz, F 2, no. 10. 34
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The fact that he left the cathedral chapter in order to marry a Lutheran did not prevent Hans Veit from having a successful career as an official in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg. Later, even as a trusted official in the prince-bishopric, Hans Veit von Würtzburg did not do anything to promote Catholicism in his own Lutheran church of Mitwitz. A statement made in 1636 by his son describes Hans Veit’s attitude: “[A]lthough he was not devoted to the Augsburg Confession, he always allowed the Lutheran pastor to remain here [Mitwitz] and did not allow a subject to be molested against his will.”36 The Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg employed Lutheran imperial knights as regional governors, many of whom were involved in the forced conversion of their co-religionaries to Catholicism, unlike Hans Veit. Although dereliction of duty on their part could be punished with nothing more severe than dismissal, the imperial knights performed their duties as officials. When one found himself involved as an official in the work of forced conversion, he often faced a thankless job of confronting unwilling subjects and unhappy Catholic reformers simultaneously. For example, in the year of 1596, the Protestant regional governor of Teuschnitz, Hieronymus von Würtzburg (the Lutheran brother of Hans Veit), complained to the prince-bishop of Bamberg about being solely responsible for removing the Lutheran minister and supporting the new priest in converting the population to Catholicism.37 To make matters worse, the new priest criticized Hieronymus for supposedly hindering Catholic reforms.38 He alleged that the governor had the butcher prepare him meat on fast days, failed to punish acts of disobedience against the Catholic faith, and dismissed Catholic subordinates.39 Despite such charges, Hieronymus continued to serve as a regional governor as did other Lutherans. A prelate, acting with the cathedral chapter’s advise, employed relatives of the canons from the ranks of imperial knighthood because of 36 StAB, B 67, no. 17, no. 6274, fol. 9’. “unerachtet er der Augsburgischen Konfession night zugetan gewesen, den evangelischen prädikanten jederzeit allda verbleiben und keinen untertanen wider sein gewissen molestieren lassen.” Quoted from Hotzelt, Familiengeschichte, 484–485. 37 For a more detailed analysis of Protestant officials involved in the forced conversion of Protestants to Catholicism see my article, Richard Ninness, “Protestants as Agents of the Counter-Reformation in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg,” Sixteenth Century Journal 3 (2009): 699–720. 38 StAB, B 49, no. 191, fols. 13 and 19. 39 In Mainz, officials were criticized for similar reasons. Jendorff, Reformatio Catholica, 250.
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their fighting ability, their administrative experience, and their financial resources.40 Such patronage was advantageous because it created a pool of loyal officials who came from families with a long history of service in the ecclesiastical principality. Office-holding provided income, prestige, and influence. Furthermore, a connection existed between office holding and entrance to the cathedral chapter. Hartmut von Kronberg, the master of the household in Mainz, sent a son into the cathedral chapter who later became the elector of Mainz. Hans Heinrich von Würtzburg, a regional governor of Teuschnitz and the older brother of the above-mentioned Hieronymus, sent sons Christoph Ulrich and Hieronymus into the cathedral chapter, where their uncle, Wolf Albrecht von Würtzburg, the provost of the cathedral chapter, looked after them.41 Despite the fact that their father was Lutheran, Christoph Ulrich and Hieronymus were baptized Catholic.42 In Bamberg, the Lutheran Lorenz von Guttenberg refused the offer to be master of the household, but he sent one of his sons into the cathedral chapter. His brother, Hans Anthoni von Guttenberg, who was one of the first Lutheran members of the family,43 was an official in Eichstätt and also sent a son into the cathedral chapter there.44 Even in the early-17th century, important prelates could come from Lutheran families. Prominent examples are Johann Gottfried von Aschhausen, the prince-bishop of Bamberg and later Würzburg, and Johann Philipp von Schörnborn, the prince-bishop of Würzburg and later elector of Mainz.45 Despite aggressive Catholicism, imperial knightly dominance of powerful ecclesiastical principalities still meant that canons and prelates could come from Lutheran families.
40 Klaus Rupprecht, Ritterschaftliche Herrschaftswahrung in Franken (Neustadt a.d. Aisch: 1994), 314; Press, “Reichsritterschaft im Reich,” 105. 41 Christoph Ulrich von Würtzburg, in Friedrich Wachter, General-PersonalSchematismus der Erzdiözese Bamberg (Bamberg: 1908), 11279. Hieronymus von Würtzburg, Wachter, General-Personal-Schematismus, 11283. Both also had prebends in Würzburg. 42 StAB, B 86, 597a. In Hieronymus’s last will and testament from 1648, he stated that he had been born Catholic. 43 Rupprecht, Ritterschaftliche Herrschaftswahrung, 272. 44 Hugo Braun, Das Domkapitel zu Eichstätt (Stuttgart: 1991), 259–260. 45 For Aschhasuen see Dieter Weiss, Das exemte Bistum Bamberg: Die Bischofsreihe von 1522 bis 1693 (Berlin: 2000), 351. Even Prince-Bishop of Würzburg and Elector of Mainz Johann Philipp von Schönborn (1605–1673) had a Lutheran father and was baptized by the Lutheran pastor of Blessenbach. Friedhelm Jürgensmeier, Johann Philipp von Schönborn und die römische Kurie (Mainz: 1977), 11f.
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After the creation of the Protestant Union and the Catholic League in 1608 and 1609 respectively, both camps looked to the imperial knights as possible allies.46 But the Protestant princes did not have a necessary advantage in negotiations with co-religionist imperial knights. The imperial knights feared that they were losing lands and privileges to both Catholic and Protestant princes. In fact, with the Franconian imperial knights actually losing members to the Lutheran margrave of Kulmbach, they might have seen the Protestant princes as more dangerous than Catholic prelates from their own families.47 In 1615, the imperial knights of the Voigtland negotiated the “Submissions-Agnitions-Rezeß” with the margrave of Kulmbach, in which they relinquished their status as imperial knights and became his subjects.48 This event both illustrates how volatile the imperial knightly movement continued to be and demonstrates how dangerous the princes were for the imperial knights, all confessional similarities notwithstanding. Like the imperial knighthood, the prince-bishoprics of Franconia feared the Protestant estates. In 1616, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria left the Catholic League. In response, the prince-bishop of Eichstätt and recently converted Wolfgang Wilhelm, count palatine of Neuburg and duke of Jülich and Berg, proposed an alliance between the princebishoprics and the imperial knights of Franconia, with the hope of later securing the support of all imperial knights in the Holy Roman Empire.49 Even though he was a Tridentine Catholic, Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt Johann Christoph von Westerstetten endorsed Wolfgang Wilhelm’s idea of an alliance.50 The prince-bishop of Eichstätt further believed “that as it is no longer in doubt that the Franconian imperial knights will gladly join with the ecclesiastical principalities and the two
46
Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe (GLA), 125/3058 and GLA 125/2390, fol. 159. Rudolf Endres, “Die Voigtländische Ritterschaft” in Rudolf Endres (ed.), Adel in der Frühneuzeit. Ein regionaler Vergleich (Cologne: 1991), 55–72; Marlene LeGates, “The Knights and the State in the Sixteenth Century” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1970). 48 Endres, “Die Voigtländische Ritterschaft,” 58–59. 49 To my knowledge, this alliance is virtually unknown in scholarly literature except for a mention in Friedrich Hefele, Der Würzburger Fürstbischof Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn und die Liga (Würzburg: 1912), 109. Proof of efforts to create such an alliance can also be found in StAB, B 48, no. 80. 50 For the Tridentine reformer, see Jonathan B. Durrant, Witchcraft, Gender and Society in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: 2007). 47
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other circles namely the Swabian and the Rhenish will follow.”51 In his judgment, an alliance with the imperial knights would do more to conserve a prince-bishopric than to ruin it, despite the fact that they were engaged in some of the fiercest disagreements with the princebishoprics over issues such as the administration of fiefs and the ius reformandi. The imperial knights especially had problems with the PrinceBishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg over the ius reformandi.52 In 1616, Bamberg even opposed the claim of the ius reformandi by the Ganerbenschaft of Rothenberg. Forty-six knights had purchased the castle of Rothenberg, which became a Ganerbenschaft at the end of the 14th century. Reflecting the confession of its holders, Rothenberg had a Lutheran church in the village of Neunkirchen am Sand. After the imperial knights built a new church in the village, Burggrave of Rothenberg Joachim Christoph von Seckendorff, an imperial knight who was also a former official in Bamberg, complained to his cousin, a canon in Bamberg, that the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg refused to acknowledge his right of reform over the church.53 Many different imperial knights owned a share of the castle, making Bamberg’s challenge more acutely felt by the Franconian imperial knights. Wolfgang Wilhelm wanted to take advantage of the difficulties that the imperial knights had with their neighbors, so that “they will have to finally to enter into an agreement absolutely with the House of Austria or with the Catholic League or with the Protestants,”54 but he saw the resolution of these differences as a necessary step in determining, “whether and how the rest can be pulled into the business at the start so that the winning of the rest of the imperial knights can continue to be deliberated.”55 The alliance did not come into being because the princebishops of Bamberg and of Würzburg refused to negotiate with the imperial knights on issues such as the ius reformandi. Still, the proposal
51 StAB, B 48, no. 80, fol. 443. “daß alß nit mehr zu zweyflen die fränckhisch ritterschafft werde sich mit den stiftern gern conjungieren vnd derselben die andere zwö kreyß nemblich der schwäbisch vnnd rheinlendisch nachuolgen.” 52 StAB, A 200, no. 65. 53 StAB, B 49, no. 131. 54 StAB, B 48, no. 80, fol. 220. “sie sich entweder absolute mit dem Hauß Osterreich oder mit der Catholische liga oder mit den protestierdenden werden entlich einlassen müssen.” 55 Ibid., fol. 418’–419. “ob vnd wie die vbrige so anfangs mit zur sachen gezogen so dan die vbrige ritterschaft . . . zugewinnen weiter deliberirt werden könde.”
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of this alliance demonstrates the complicated interplay between militant Catholicism and imperial knights in the Holy Roman Empire. By the early phase of the Thirty Years War, politics and confession began to overwhelm family ties among imperial knights in the ecclesiastical principalities. In the fall of 1619, just after Frederick V assumed the crown of Bohemia and with the Battle of White Mountain only a year away, the knights debated whether they should take sides in the conflict. Frederick V assured them that the Protestant Union was not intended for any other purpose than defending the Lutheran faith.56 Still, when Frederick V invited the Lutheran imperial knights to a meeting of Protestants in Nuremberg in November 1619, many hesitated. The Rhenish imperial knights maintained their neutrality.57 Their call not to allow themselves to be divided by religion was echoed by their Swabian brethren. In response to the invitation from Frederick V, the director of the Swabian imperial knights asserted that they should remain neutral, since neither the Catholic nor the Protestant camps wanted to harm their organization and its privileges.58 Only the Swabian canton Kraichgau accepted the invitation to attend. In the judgment of the Franconian imperial knights, however, working with the Protestant camp would defend the liberty of the Lutheran religion in the German nation and therewith the interests of all imperial knights. Members reasoned that most of the imperial knights of Franconia were Lutheran anyway, and “it is not advisable to let the estates of the Union slip out of our hands with silence or a negative answer.”59 They perceived their rights to be threatened to such a point that they had to attend the meeting of Protestants in November 1619. Even though the Franconian imperial knights sent a delegation to the meeting, it would be false to say that they were pleased to ally with the Protestant camp. Frederick V’s disregard for the emperor’s authority in his usurpation of the Bohemian crown probably appalled the imperial knights, who were the emperor’s direct vassals. Even if most of the Franconian knights shared the confession of the Protestant estates, they had their doubts about the Protestant camp: Frederick V 56 StAB, A 200, no. 79; Staatsarchiv Nürnberg (StAN), Rep. 210a, Reichsritterschaft no. 1013, 1744, fol. 341–342. 57 Press, “Reichsritterschaft im Reich,” 116. 58 GLA 125/3058, 21 October 1619. 59 StAB, A 200, no. 79; StAN, Rep. 210a, Reichsritterschaft no. 1013, 1744, fol. 337. “sich gantz und gar zu entschlagen oder den unirten ständen diß falß mit stillschweigen oder abschlaglicher antwort aus den händen zu gehen nicht zu rathen ist.”
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was a Calvinist outside the pale of the Religious Peace, which they valued so highly. They had already lost members to the Margraviate of Kulmbach, and they believed that joining the alliance meant death and destruction in the Holy Roman Empire. In the fall of 1619, many of the Franconian imperial knights questioned a war which would “ruin people and land, and pour innocent Christian blood with the result that finally the entire Roman Empire could be ruined.”60 But they did not dare offend Frederick V and the Protestant estates because they could see with their own eyes “that the electors and estates of the Union find themselves in a high level of battle readiness.”61 Furthermore, they might have thought that they could take advantage of Protestant power to address their grievances with Bamberg and Würzburg, which, since the death of Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn in 1617, was now under the personal union of Johann Gottfried von Aschhausen. At the November meeting of the Protestants in Nuremberg in 1619, the Franconian cantons Baunach, Gebürg, Steigerwald, and Rhön-Werra were ready to support the Protestant Union with a company of riders.62 Two other Franconian cantons, Odenwald and Altmühl, did not want to offend the emperor and the Catholic League by offering armed support to the Protestant Union but offered some money instead.63 The canton Kraichgau, which had the Electorate Palatinate as a neighbor, did likewise.64 The politics of the Franconian imperial knights effectively divided the imperial knighthood. At their next meeting, in 1620 at Speyer, where Swabia held the directorship, the Franconian delegation consisted of a lone knight from Odenwald, demonstrating the collapse of the governing system of the imperial knighthood.65 The most vocally Protestant imperial knightly cantons, RhönWerra, Baunach, Gebürg, and Steigerwald, were centered around the prince-bishoprics of Würzburg and Bamberg. The obvious explanation for their activism might be that the aggressive Catholic policies of these prince-bishoprics drove these imperial knights into the arms of
60 GLA, 125/3058, fol. 408. “land vnd leuth verderben vndt vnschuldiges christen bluth vergießen sollen darddurch entlich das ganze römische reich köndte ruinirt werden.” 61 GLA, 125/3058, fol. 153. “daß sich die Vnirten Churfürsten vnndt ständt in starkher kreigßverfassung befinden.” 62 Press, “Die Ritterschaft im Kraichgau,” 80; StAN, Rep. 210a, Reichsritterschaft no. 1013, 1744, fol. 338; Staatsarchiv Koblenz, 53 B, no. 696, fol. 702. 63 Staatsarchiv Koblenz, 53 B, no. 696, fol. 702. 64 Staatsarchiv Koblenz, 53 B, no. 696, fol. 702. 65 Staatsarchiv Koblenz, 53 B, no. 698.
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the Protestants. Yet, their worst losses actually came at the hands of Lutheran princes: the Hohenzollerns in Franconia mediatized many of the Franconian imperial knights in 1615. They were ready to work with the Protestant camp, but they certainly understood the dangers of allying with the Protestant princes. Moreover, they still supported the Ecclesiastical Reservation. In 1619, when the Winter King was at the zenith of his power, the imperial knights worried about ecclesiastical principalities becoming Protestant. Protestant bishops might father heirs and as a result, “the bishoprics would then be considered hereditary lands maybe divided between princes or the oldest would want to be bishop, or the second oldest provost and so in succession.”66 They also further worried “whether such bishops will marry young ladies which might burden the bishoprics with a wedding, taxes for the morning gift, baptism, and the same.”67 In fact, the leading knights of Franconia came from families closely involved with Catholic ecclesiastical principalities and saw them as centers of imperial knightly power. For example, the Lutheran Hans Sebastian von Rotenhan was the director of the Franconian Circle of imperial knights in 1619, but he had intimate contact with the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg. In 1594, his Lutheran mother married Hans Veit von Würtzburg. It is reasonable to assume that Hans Sebastian had attended that wedding as a boy. Its festivities celebrated imperial knightly power, when canons from the cathedral chapter left Bamberg to join the celebration, and the newly-married couple received gifts from the princebishops of Franconia, even including Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn. As a result of his stepfather, Hans Sebastian had connections to the imperial knights who served as officeholders in Bamberg. In 1601, a year after his mother’s death, Hans Sebastian von Rotenhan, probably with the help of his stepfather, who was the captain of Kronach at the time, negotiated a marriage with Magdalena Stiebar, the daughter of an imperial knight who was Schultheiß of Forchheim. It had to be clear to Hans Sebastian that the prince-bishopric as an aristocratic republic provided patronage, and a prince-bishop with the assistance of canons governed Bamberg proudly without princely interference. Hans
66 GLA, 125/3058, fol. 411. “dies bistummen allß dann vor Erblandt würden gehalten villeicht vnder die herrn vertheilt oder der eltiste bischoff der ander tumbprobst et consequenter zu sein würden begeren.” 67 GLA, 125/3058, fol. 411. “ob nicht was auch solche bishoffen frwlein verhewrathen die bistumber mit hochzeit, stwer jtem zu der morgengab, kindtauff vndt dergleichen möchten beschwert werden.”
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Sebastian’s own background might help explain imperial knightly support for the Ecclesiastical Reservation and scepticism of Protestant princes in 1619. As long as the Thirty Years War was fought in Bohemia, in northern Germany, and in the Palatinate, imperial knights defended their ius reformandi against local ecclesiastical principalities and experienced few hardships of the war. These conditions changed drastically after Gustavus Adolphus defeated Tilly and the Catholic forces at Breitenfeld on September 17, 1631, bringing the horrors of war to those regions where the imperial knights and the ecclesiastical principalities flourished. Prelates and canons were helpless to do anything but flee. The presence of Swedish and Catholic armies overshadowed the local confessional struggle of Protestants and Catholics and moderated ecclesiastical policies. In fact, these same prelates who had earlier advocated aggressive Catholic reform were later instrumental in bringing about the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The Elector of Mainz, Johann Philip von Schönborn, and others like him, such as Prince-Bishop of Bamberg Melchior Otto Voit von Salzburg, were leading voices in the peace movement.68 After the expulsion of the Swedish army from the Priest Alley in 1634, the returning prelates worked toward preserving what was left of their territory and authority, realizing that the strength of ecclesiastical principalities lay not in depending on the pope or the emperor, but in achieving peace and strengthening their ties with the imperial knights.69 This essay argues that the dominance of the imperial knights over some of the most important ecclesiastical principalities in the Empire
68 For Johann Philip von Schönborn’s role in the peace negotiations, see Jürgensmeier, Johann Philipp von Schönborn. For Bamberg see Heinrich Dietz, “Die Politik des Hochstifts Bamberg am Ende des Dreißigjährigen Krieges,” Berichte des Historschen Vereins Bamberg, Beiheft 4 (1968): 80f. 69 During the negotiations at Münster and Osnabrück, which led to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Habsburgs offered Sweden and Brandenburg princebishoprics as territorial compensation. Catholic extremists and the Vatican opposed religious compromise. A day after his election as Elector of Mainz, Johann Philip von Schönborn informed a papal nuncio that he would work for the honor of the church and the salvation of souls. Moreover, he would do everything in his power to bring about peace. Jürgensmeier, Johann Philipp von Schönborn, 120. After the Thirty Years War, prelates recognized the ius reformandi of the imperial knights and attempted to form another alliance with them. We can interpret this proposed alliance as a continuation of efforts from 1616. Werner Kundert, “Reichsritterschaft und Reichskirche vornemlich in Schwaben 1555–1803” in Franz Quarthal (ed.), Zwischen Schwarzwald und Schwäbischer Alb. Das Land am oberen Neckar (Sigmaringen: 1984), 308–309.
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allowed the imperial knights to use them as centers of aristocratic activity for social interaction, business transactions, and career opportunities. Their concern for these ecclesiastical principalities strongly influenced their outlook on events and helps explain the strategies they developed in negotiating the political and religious crises that confronted them after the fragmentation of European Christianity. Although prelates and canons endeavored to keep their ecclesiastical principalities Catholic, they maintained strong relations with Protestant imperial knights based on custom, kinship, and mutual economic benefits. Only gradually did a militant attitude toward Protestantism develop in the late-16th century, fueled by a new generation of bishops, inspired by Tridentine Catholicism. Even with a more aggressive Catholicism threatening their privileges, Protestant imperial knights realized the importance of the imperial church and the danger of Protestant princes. Many imperial knights were ready to work with the Protestant camp by 1619, but they still clung to the familiar, but increasingly complicated relationship they shared with the imperial church. Efforts to reevaluate this era as early modern Catholicism, the Catholic Reformation, or Catholic confessionalization have made significant contributions in altering the Counter-Reformation narrative.70 But militant Catholicism, with the help of aggressive princes and the Jesuits, continues to wage war against Protestantism in textbook literature and scholarly studies.71 We can not overlook the hardening
70 Early modern Catholicism and the Catholic Reformation emphasize new forms of devotion and the arts and demonstrate that Catholicism received new strength as an international movement with missions in the New World and Asia. See O’Malley, Trent and All That; Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal. Catholic confessionalization sees the Reformation and Counter-Reformation as structurally parallel, with both Reformation and Counter-Reformation or Protestant and Catholic movements expressing modern traits, such as individualism and rationality, taking away the stigma of Catholicism being merely reactionary. Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 232f. We can already observe this approach in Zeeden‘s work. Ernst W. Zeeden, “Das Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe” in Herbert Grundmann (ed.), Gebhardt. Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, 8th ed., vol. 2 (Stuttgart: 1955), 105f. 71 One can look in any textbook to find this approach. See for example Mark Kishlansky, Patrick Geary, and Patricia O’Brien (eds.), Civilization in the West, 6th ed. (New York: 2007). In scholarly studies dealing with ecclesiastical principalities in the Holy Roman Empire, the narrative often centers on a Catholic prelate’s success or failure in ridding his see of Protestants and reforming it according to the principles
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of confessional fronts in the Empire, but even this component of the Counter-Reformation narrative needs to be interpreted in a more nuanced way. Previously overlooked historical actors like the imperial knights will help lead to a new perspective. The search for less doctrinaire methods of inquiry inspired my work on the imperial knights, which weighs religious decisions along with many other binding influences, highlighting contingency and human agency and the complications of confessional life in the Holy Roman Empire.72 The ecclesiastical principalities, especially those run by imperial knights, played a decisive role in the resurgence of Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire. By studying them, we can observe that a new, aggressive Catholicism still maintained strong ties of kinship and association to the imperial knighthood, resulting in a dizzying array of roles and situations that do not conform to any notion of confessional polarization. Ecclesiastical principalities took advantage of Catholic success in the war to seize imperial knightly church property, and a number of imperial knights allied with the Protestant Union and then with Sweden. Yet, by 1635, prelates realized that this religious conflict was too destructive to maintain. It is no coincidence that a leading voice in the peace movement which ended the Thirty Years War was Johann Phillip von Schönborn, the prince-bishop of Würzburg and later the elector of Mainz, who came from this world of imperial knights, where Lutherans served as officials in Catholic ecclesiastical principalities, canons came from Lutheran families, and the imperial knights supported the toleration mandated in the Peace of Augsburg. Kinship ties, an aristocratic culture, and imperial law formed the nobility’s outlook on confession, but these customs and principles did not apply to the subjects of the imperial knights or those of a prelate. In the ecclesiastical principalities dominated by imperial knights, this aristocratic worldview not only existed within the context of multiconfessionalism, but also profoundly shaped the Counter-Reformation.
of the Council of Trent. Jendorff sees this as a problem of Catholic Church history as it is practiced in Germany. Jendorff, Reformatio Catholica, 7–9. 72 Wandel speaks eloquently about agency during the Reformation in Lee Palmer Wandel, “Ranke Meets Gadamer: The Question of Agency in the Reformation” in Christopher Ocker, Michael Printy, Peter Starenko, and Peter Wallace (eds.), Politics and Reformations: Histories and Reformations. Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady Jr. (Leiden: 2007), 63–78.
MULTICONFESSIONALISM IN THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE: THE CASE OF COLMAR, 1550–1750 Peter G. Wallace Wär Bueb geblieben Knecht Und Linck geblieben recht Und Goll geblieben stumm Wär Colmar nit in Luthertum1
This 19th-century ditty presents the Reformation in the Alsatian imperial city of Colmar in 1575 as the work of two civic magistrates, Michael Buob and Hans Goll, and an ennobled patrician, Sebastian Wilhelm Linck von Thurnburg, whose decisions to behave in ways distinct from their patronymics allowed Colmar to become “Lutheran”. The poem reflects the collective memory of the 18th-century Lutheran community, which traced its roots to the city’s initial reformers. This memory is false. Colmar never became completely Lutheran, as external protectors and internal resilience sustained Catholic worship in what became a biconfessional town, where both Evangelicals and Catholics could worship publicly. In his overview for this section on multiconfessionalism in the Holy Roman Empire, David Luebke offers six forms of multiconfessional relations: hybrid, where pastors accommodated a confessional mix among parishioners; subcutaneous, where diversity survived beneath the surface of official conformity; entrenched, where local elites strove to protect local political interests by tolerating informal multiconfessionality; liminal, where believers could cross over territorial boundaries to worship at a neighboring site; co-equal, where the confessions observed formal legal parity; and concentric, where the prince’s court alone remained confessionally exclusive.2 Even prior to its Reformation Colmar’s civic community was multiconfessional, and from 1575 down to the French Revolution, Colmar would be officially biconfessional, except for a brief Habsburg counter-reform interim from 1628 until
1 Johann Adam, Evangelische Kirchengeschichte der elsässischen Territorien bis zur Französischen Revolution (Strasbourg: 1928), 469. 2 See David Luebke’s essay in this volume.
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1632. Biconfessionality survived French conquest of Colmar in 1673 and a second round of counter-reform initiatives by Louis XIV. By the 18th century, inter-confessional relations in Colmar would resemble the complex mix of interaction and alienation at play in contemporary Augsburg.3 Were there “invisible borders” separating Colmar’s 18th-century Lutherans and Catholics? If so, were they a product of French rule or of dynamic forces within the civic community? In an earlier monograph, I explored structural shifts in socio-economic relations in biconfessional Colmar between 1575 and 1730.4 This essay will draw on that work but also show that Colmar’s confessional communities experienced all six of these forms of multiconfessional relations between 1550 and 1750. Prelude to Reformation Sixteenth-century Colmar was a middle-sized imperial City (Reichsstadt), located in the fertile Alsatian plain on the western bank of the Upper Rhine with a population of 7,000 by 1600.5 Colmar was a member of the Decapolis, a league of ten Alsatian imperial cities whose immediacy to the Emperor passed through his Alsatian bailiff, the Reichslandvogt of Haguenau, an office controlled by the Habsburgs after 1558.6 Civic territory bordered on the Württemberg county of Horbourg-Riquewihr and various holdings of Habsburg Outer Austria (Vorderösterreich) administered for the archdukes by officials at the Upper Alsatian town of Ensisheim.7 More than half of Colmar’s 16th-century guildsmen were inscribed in the city’s three rural guilds, while many Colmarians owned or leased fields and vineyards in the neighboring Württemberg and Habsburg lordships.8 The countryside
3 Etienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg, 1648–1806 (Sigmaringen: 1991), 225–30. 4 Peter G. Wallace, Communities and Conflict in Early Modern Colmar: 1575–1730 (Atlantic Highlands NJ: 1995). 5 Wallace, Communities, 55–8. 6 Lucien Sittler, La Décapole alsacienne, des origines à la fin du Moyen-âge (Strasbourg: 1955). 7 Karl Josef Seidel, Das Oberelsaß vor dem Übergang an Frankreich: Landherrschaft, Landstände und fürstliche Verwaltung in Alt-Vorderösterreich (1602–1638) (Bonn: 1980). 8 Wallace, Communities, 52–55.
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was an integral part of Colmar’s civic landscape, and regional confessional conflicts would resonate in Colmar’s streets and guildhalls. As an imperial city, its civic regime (Regiment) negotiated directly with the emperor and claimed authority over all civic affairs. Since a constitutional reform in 1521, an inner council of five magistrates (Meister) headed by an Obristmeister with two professional employees, the Stadtschreiber (city clerk) and the Gerichtsschreiber (court clerk), governed the city. Despite an elaborate annual ritual of electoral caucuses, Colmar’s magistrates served for life and replaced deceased colleagues by co-optation. A Council (Rat) comprised a second tier of government. Traditionally, each of Colmar’s ten guilds (Zünfte) provided three representatives to the Council, but only the ten guildmasters (Zunftmeister) were directly elected by the guilds. Normally, the magistrates governed without consulting the citizens, but for critical decisions the Obristmeister might assemble the leading guildsmen as a Schöffenrat (council of jurors) or consult with individual guilds.9 Despite the regime’s pretensions to full authority within civic walls, Colmar’s religious communities were privileged corporations under the jurisdiction and protection of neighboring ecclesiastical and lay lords and often at odds with the city.10 Medieval Colmar possessed three parish churches, but by 1550 St. Martin’s, a chapter house with a handful of canons headed by a dean, was the only functioning parish, as Colmar’s political and sacral communities had become one. The Benedictine abbey at Munster in the nearby Vosges claimed patronage rights over St. Martin’s clergy and half of its tithe revenue.11 The civic regime held administrative rights (Pflegschaft) over St. Martin’s fabric and during the 16th century gained the right to confirm new deans in their appointment.12 Late medieval Colmar sheltered several mendicant communities and other religious houses, but, in 1543, following the death of the last resident friar, the Franciscans sold their friary, church, and properties to the city. When the last monk at the Benedictine priory of St. Peter’s
9
Wallace, Communities, 19–22. Dieter Demandt, “Konflikte um geistlichen Standespriviligien im spätmittelalterlichen Colmar” in Ingrid Bátori (ed.), Städtische Gesellschaft und Reformation (Stuttgart: 1980), 136–54. 11 Kaspar von Greyerz, The Late City Reformation in Germany: The Case of Colmar, 1522–1628 (Wiesbaden: 1980), 27–31. 12 François Auguste Goehlinger, Histoire du chapitre de l’église collégiale St-Martin de Colmar (Colmar: 1951), 266–76. 10
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died in 1575, Colmar purchased the priory and its properties from Bern, which had secularized the motherhouse in 1536. The Knights Hospitaller of St. John and the Augustinian Friars maintained small houses in the city as well, but on the eve of Colmar’s Reformation only the Dominicans remained prominent in civic religious life with a friary and the city’s only two convents—St. Catharine’s and Unterlinden.13 Colmar’s religious communities were well-endowed; but as the Reformation spread throughout the imperial Church, the number of resident canons, monks, friars, and nuns declined. Moreover, those who remained were poorly prepared to meet the Colmarians’ spiritual needs.14 There were two attempts to bring the Reformation to Colmar. The first in the 1520s drew support from Colmar’s rural guildsmen. This Reformation “from below” called for the moral regeneration among civic clergy, evangelical preaching, and an array of social and political reforms. The movement failed to achieve its ends, although over the ensuing decades Colmar’s magistrates used the citizens’ engrained frustration to pressure Catholic clergy to meet fiscal responsibilities to the city and spiritual responsibilities to the parish.15 The canons of St. Martin’s and the Dominicans, however, resisted pleas from the magistrates to upgrade the curriculum at the civic schools, defended their legal privileges, and fell in arrears in paying civic taxes.16 In the 1540s, the frustrated magistrates assumed control over the schools and began recruiting reform-minded, Catholic preachers, who criticized clerical shortcomings from the pulpit of the former Franciscan church.17 In 1535, the introduction of Evangelical worship in the neighboring Württemberg villages offered Colmarians the “liminal” opportunity to attend Reformed Sunday services at neighboring Horbourg.18 Colmar’s Catholic clergy complained to the magistrates and Habsburg officials at Ensisheim of declining attendance at Mass. The magistrates reminded
13
Von Greyerz, Reformation, 31–4. Jürgen Bücking refers to a “seelsorgerliche ‘Vakuum’” at Colmar. See idem, Johann Rasser (c.1535–1594) und die Gegenreformation im Oberelsass (Münster: 1970), 19. 15 Von Greyerz, Reformation, 44–64. 16 The tax disputes were interminable, see Archives Municipales de Colmar [hereafter, AMC], GG 29, a–c. 17 Von Greyerz, Reformation, 80–1. 18 On Horbourg-Riquewihr, see Adam, Kirchengeschichte, 292–348, esp. 295–303. 14
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the canons and the Austrian officials that the city remained Catholic and blamed poor attendance on lax morals and religious indifference among the canons. Kaspar von Greyerz has shown that prior to 1555 Colmar’s lay leaders still sought religious reform within the Catholic Church, while the Colmarians, who attended services at Horbourg, did not yet represent a confessional party within the city.19 Following the religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555, new councilors with Evangelical sympathies, headed by Buob, Goll, and Linck, entered civic government.20 In 1565, Colmar’s Alsatian ally, the imperial city of Haguenau, claimed the ius reformandi, which was guaranteed to imperial princes by the religious peace, and established a Lutheran parish. Colmar’s magistrates waited to gauge the Habsburgs’ reaction. When an imperial commission failed to suppress Haguenau’s Reformation and Emperor Maximilian II appeared reluctant to employ force, Evangelical sympathizers among Colmar’s magistrates saw their opportunity.21 Colmar’s Late City Reformation and Its Aftermath On 15 May 1575, Colmar’s magistrates invited Johannes Cellarius, pastor at nearby Jebsheim, to conduct Evangelical services in the Franciscan church. Deeply-rooted concerns over Archduke Ferdinand’s reaction, as both Reichslandvogt and ruler of Outer Austria, and respect for the Catholic majority among Colmarians themselves led civic officials to consult the guilds individually before acting. Whatever their religious views, the guildsmen affirmed the regime’s claim to the ius reformandi, provided that all citizens retained the right to choose their church. Although the Lutheran superintendent at Riquewihr claimed that 3,000 Colmarians attended the initial sermon, the Evangelical communion service later that month (29 May) drew only 100 committed believers. In fact Johann Rasser, a former dean at St. Martin’s, claimed that Colmar’s Reformation revived attendance at Mass.22 According to communion registers, Catholic services continued to attract significantly more communicants than the Lord’s Supper into
19 20 21 22
Von Greyerz, Reformation, 84–93. Wallace, Communities, 26–31. Von Greyerz, Reformation, 94–9. Bücking, Rasser, 29.
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the 17th century.23 By 1610, however, householders, who had married or baptized their children in the Evangelical church, comprised a clear majority (612/1057) of taxpayers, while Catholics accounted for slightly more than one-quarter (267).24 The difference in confessional balance between householders and communicants may reflect stronger Catholic allegiance among poorer, resident non-citizens or attendance by neighboring villagers at St. Martin’s; but clearly, given the freedom to choose one’s confession demanded by the guildsmen in 1575, the majority of Colmar’s early 17th-century citizens had chosen Evangelicalism. How had biconfessionalism altered civic life? Colmar’s Reformation undermined the two pillars of civic political culture, placing the city at odds with the emperor, who legitimized power from above, and dividing the city into separate communities of worship, which fractured the sacral underpinnings of civic authority from below. In 1575, the canons of St. Martin’s immediately called for an imperial commission to end Evangelical worship in the city. With support from Outer Austrian officials and the reform-minded bishop of Basel, Jacob Christoph Blarer von Wartensee, commissioners visited Colmar in December 1575 and again in 1579. Each time they ordered the closure of the Evangelical church. In response the magistrates assembled the Schöffenrat, which reaffirmed communal support of the ius reformandi and the citizens’ right to choose their church.25 Colmar’s biconfessionalism may have been initiated from above, but it had quickly become a communal norm. Despite repeated requests from Colmar’s Catholic clergy, there would be no further commissions for the next half century. The Schöffenrat had confirmed religious biconfessionalism, but the civic regime was soon dominated by Evangelicals and would sever connections between Catholic rituals and public life. Following a fire in 1572, the city had rebuilt St. Martin’s bell-towers. When the imperial commissioners insisted on additional maintenance of the chapter church in 1579, the magistrates countered that debts from that earlier work left no funds for additional repairs. The magistrates had limited 23 The Lord’s Supper at Whitsun in 1610 drew 882 communicants; Catholic communion services in 1613 attracted 1500; see von Greyerz, Reformation, 154. 24 Catholic registers are incomplete until the mid-17th century, and Catholics probably represent the majority of confessionally “unidentified” householders: 10.7 percent in 1610. Around 3 percent crossed confessional lines and appear in both registers between 1575 and 1627. 25 Bücking, Rasser, 25–6.
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bell ringing at St. Martin’s to tolling the two smallest bells to call the faithful to services; and after the canons ignored this prohibition on Corpus Christi in 1578, they found the bell cords cut the following Sunday.26 In 1588, “to preserve civic peace” after the Corpus Christi procession had led to verbal confrontations, the magistrates banned all Catholic processions. Civic officials scoured Catholic symbols from civic buildings and demolished or secularized several chapels, turning St. Peter’s priory into the municipal woodshed. Crosses and shrines disappeared from niches, gates, and the civic cemetery.27 The magistrates also declined to adopt the “popish” Gregorian calendar.28 Despite official biconfessionalism, by 1600, Colmar’s Catholic clergy felt beleaguered, and the Catholic minority among the citizens was confessionally alienated from civic life. For much of its first decades, Colmar’s Evangelical community was itself confessionally divided. Although the magistrates continually cited the Augsburg Confession as the defining document for Colmar’s Evangelical church, officials resisted pressure from Lutheran Strasbourg and Württemberg to sign the Formula of Concord. According to Kaspar von Greyerz, Christian Serinus, Colmar’s first pastor, supported by Andreas Sandherr, the Gerichtsschreiber, favored a Philippist interpretation of the Lord’s Supper and Christology, which was unacceptable to “Orthodox” Gnesio-Lutherans at Strasbourg and Horbourg-Riquewihr, who advocated the Formula.29 The theological issues dividing the Alsatian Evangelicals were subtle, yet Colmar’s magistrates must have appreciated the political implications of their confessional stance. In 1589, intra-Evangelical tensions triggered a public confrontation, when Colmar’s new deacon, Johann Georg Magnus, preached Orthodox views on the Lord’s Supper to the consternation of Serinus and Sandherr, whom he referred to as “Zwinglian hornets”.30 In response Sandherr composed a Deklarationsschrift that attempted to gloss over the points of contention between Philippists and Orthodox Lutherans. Orthodoxy, however, was triumphing among imperial Lutherans; when Colmar’s regime shared the document with Lutheran churchmen at
26 27 28 29 30
Goehlinger, Histoire, 286–93. Adam, Kirchengeschichte, 474–5. AMC, GG 155, 1–4. Von Greyerz, Reformation, 134–46. Von Greyerz, Reformation, 131–2.
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Strasbourg and Wissembourg, they condemned it.31 Nevertheless, on 22 December 1589, following an internal review and ratification, the magistrates presented the Deklarationsschrift to Magnus, who refused to sign and was released. Colmar’s next two diaconal recruits also refused.32 One deacon, Andreas Irsamer, who had signed, later drifted into fitful opposition, and, in 1594, the Lutheran pastor at Horbourg mocked Colmar’s three Evangelical ministers and their “three different religions”.33 Deteriorating confessional relations with Lutheran Strasbourg and Horbourg-Riquewihr would eventually drive Colmar’s Evangelical church to closer ties with Reformed Basel and Rhenish Calvinism but not until the early-17th century.34 As late as 1600, Colmar’s disgruntled first deacon, Johann Ernst Fritsch, and the Latin schoolmaster, Christoph Kirchner, headed an Orthodox Lutheran faction of prominent citizens within the Evangelical parish, while other citizens made the “liminal” choice to worship at Horbourg’s Lutheran church.35 Between 1575 and the disestablishment of the Evangelical parish in 1627, 21 men served as ministers. Colmar’s magistrates initially consulted both Simon Sulzer at Basel and Johann Marbach at Strasbourg regarding potential recruits, as relations between these leaders and their churches remained cordial until Sulzer’s death in 1585. Afterward, Johann Pappus at Strasbourg and Basel’s new Antistes, Johann Jacob Grynaeus, became increasingly embittered confessional opponents. Down to 1598, despite strained confessional relations over the Deklarationsschrift, Colmar’s magistrates continued to consult Pappus and to recruit ministers with ties to Württemberg or Strasbourg.36 In 1602, Sebastian Wilhelm Linck von Thurnburg, now a magistrate, recruited Ambrosius Socinus, who had been expelled from Badenweiler for his
31
Adam, Kirchengeschichte, 471–2. Marie-Joseph Bopp, Die evangelische Geistlichen und Theologen in Elsaß und Lothringen von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Neustadt/Aisch: 1959), Bartholomäus Haller (211, no. 943); and David Hiemeyer (241, no. 2243). 33 Von Greyerz, Reformation, 145–50, quote at 149, n. 114. 34 Kaspar von Greyerz, “Basels kirchliche und konfessionelle Beziehungen zum Oberrhein im späten 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhundert” in Martin Bircher, Walter Sparn, and Erdman Weyrauch (eds.), Schweizerisch-deutsche Beziehungen im konfessionellen Zeitalter: Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte 1580–1650 (Wiesbaden: 1984), 227–52. 35 Wallace, Communities, 25. See also AMC, GG 158, 38. 36 Haller, Hiemeyer (see note 32), Andreas Irsamer (Bopp, Geistlichen, 264, no. 2486), and Samuel Radspinner (423, no. 4066), had ties to Strasbourg; while Johannes Gloß (186, no. 1698), and Johann Ernst Fritsch (168, no. 1504) had roots in Württemberg. 32
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Calvinism, as Serinus’s successor and then supported the new pastor as he recruited ministers trained in the Calvinist centers of Heidelberg and Basel.37 In 1624, Jacob Stephan became the city’s first native-born deacon, and his appointment possibly signaled a deepening commitment to Calvinism among Evangelical Colmarians. When the imperial commission of 1627 disbanded the parish, its ministers sought refuge and found new postings in Switzerland.38 Colmar’s Evangelical elite, however, would be more divided in its response. In 1575, three magistrates, Gregorius Berger, Michael Buob, and Hans Goll, along with the Stadtschreiber, Beat Henslin, and Gerichtsschreiber, Andreas Sandherr, advocated the Evangelical initiative. From Colmar’s Reformation down to 1627, all new magistrates would attend services at the Evangelical parish.39 The initial recruits, Henslin (1576) and Linck (1582), replaced deceased Catholic magistrates. When plague claimed the three Evangelical founders in 1588, just before the parish’s intra-confessional dispute, Johann Georg Magnus may have anticipated that the new magistrates would favor Orthodox Lutheranism. Linck and Henslin, however, supported Andreas Sandherr’s Deklarationsschrift, and von Greyerz believes that the new Obristmeister, Ludwig Kriegelstein, joined them.40 From 1588 until 1627, new magistrates, like Kriegelstein, came from a small circle of elite Evangelical families.41 Among Colmar’s councilors and guildmasters, only ten of 109 entering officeholders between 1575 and 1627 were Catholics.42 Colmar’s Schöffenrat may have authorized religious biconfessionalism, but Colmar’s regime was almost, but not exclusively, Evangelical, although the depth of confessional sympathies among regime members remains obscure. Among the economic elite, Colmar’s confessional swing toward Basel and Rhenish Calvinism had an impact. In 1620, at least 85 percent
37
Bopp, Geistlichen, Socinus (516, no. 4935), Matthis Heiner (222, no. 2054), Nicolaus Socinus (516, no. 4936), Georg Hopf (254, no. 2379), Matthias Könen (302, no. 2851), Jacob Stephan (529, no. 5052), and Elias Pellitarius (409, no. 3298). 38 Colmar’s pastor, Matthias Könen, settled at Biel, while Pellitarius, Stephan, and Hopf found livings in the Bernese countryside (see note 37). 39 Wallace, Communities, 28–30, table at 29. 40 Von Greyerz, Reformation, 141–2. 41 On Colmar’s elite, see Erdmann Weyrauch, “Die politische Führungsgruppe in Colmar zur Zeit der Reformation” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen (ed.), Stadtbürgertum und Adel in der Reformation: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der Reformation in England und Deutschland (Stuttgart: 1979), 215–35. 42 Wallace, Communities, 30–33, table at 31.
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(46/54) of the householders with taxable properties assessed above 2,000 florins were Evangelicals.43 Among them were three Frenchspeaking Calvinist merchants (welsche Krämer) with Rhenish and Swiss roots, Claude Sison, Jean-François Guibert, and Gideon Sarasin.44 They headed a cohort of Calvinist immigrants from the Rhineland and Switzerland: 46 householders in all, about 13 percent of Evangelical immigrants between 1575 and 1627. Nevertheless, significantly more householders (136/360) immigrated from Lutheran communities in Lower and Upper Alsace. In contrast Colmar’s Catholic parish remained insular, attracting only 52 outsiders, nearly all of whom came from neighboring Habsburg villages.45 An immigrant’s place of origin, however, did not necessarily imply his confession. The pewter smith, Augustin Güntzer, came from a Reformed enclave in nominally Catholic Obernai in Lower Alsace. In 1623, he settled at Colmar and married the daughter of a Calvinist councilor.46 Güntzer was a devout Calvinist, and his marriage connected him to a network of elite families who shared his faith. Unlike Güntzer, however, the welsche Krämer had initially bickered with native merchants and intermarried.47 Although it is difficult to determine the depth to which the Calvinism among Colmar’s early-17th-century Evangelical ministers resonated among their parishioners, some elites supported the confessional shift. Nevertheless, intra-confessional tensions among Colmar’s Evangelical ministers and lay intellectuals and the Rhenish confessional networks of some merchants probably did not penetrate into the rank and file of Colmar’s Evangelical parish. By 1620, Colmar’s Evangelicals, whether Lutheran or Calvinist, formed a majority of taxpaying residents in every neighborhood except 43 Colmar’s tax on property (Gewerf ) officially assessed rates at 0.5 percent, but the rich often paid at lower rates. Wallace, Communities, 75–8. 44 Lucien Sittler, “Commerce et commerçants dans le vieux-Colmar,” Annuaire de Colmar (1966): 14–48, here at 28–9. In 1620, they were assessed at 13,500 florins, far more than the combined assessment of the 103 householders in the lowest tax stratum. 45 Wallace, Communities, 60–4. 46 Augustin Güntzer, in Fabien Brändle and Dominik Sieber (eds.), Kleines Biechlin von meinem gantze Leben: Die Autobiographie eines Elsässer Kannengießers aus dem 17. Jahrhundert (Cologne: 2002), 156–64. 47 Guibert (Wybert), Sarasin, and Sison first traded as protected residents (Schirmverwandten), triggering calls for their expulsion from Evangelical commercial rivals. AMC, HH 27, 33. In response, the three purchased citizenship and joined a guild. See the excellent Lizentiatsarbeit of Nora Fehr, Gegenreformation und Migration in 17. Jahrhundert: Colmarer Protestanten in Basel (Basel: 1999), 56.
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the streets surrounding the Dominican friary and convents. Evangelicals also comprised the majority in all but Colmar’s two agricultural guilds, Ackerleute and zum Haspel. The concentration of Catholics among rural workers, including numerous vintners in Rebleute, may be explained by the proximity of Outer Austrian villages and tenancies available from Colmar’s Catholic religious houses. Although no guild was exclusively Evangelical, some trades within the guilds were, and Catholics had to purchase goods from Evangelical shopkeepers. The Evangelical parish at Haguenau was limited to the city’s elite and would not survive a Habsburg counter-reform in 1624. At Colmar, Evangelicals formed a majority in every tax bracket, as wealthy merchants, landowners, middling craftsmen, and poorer workers worshipped together in both churches.48 At the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, confessional differences at Colmar did not exacerbate social tensions between rich and poor. The Habsburg Counter-Reform and Colmar’s Second Reformation As the Emperor’s armies drove his enemies out of much of Germany, imperial commissioners under Archduke Leopold of Outer Austria arrived at Colmar in November 1627 to implement a long-intended counter-reform that ended the Calvinist era in Colmar’s Evangelical history by closing the church and deposing the regime that supported it. Although grievances from Colmar’s Catholic clergy had been instrumental in securing the imperial commission, they would play no role in the Habsburg counter-reform, which was spearheaded by Jesuits and Capuchins from Ensisheim. In January 1628, Emperor Ferdinand II ended biconfessionalism at Colmar. Only Catholic services would be sanctioned within the walls, and citizens faced stiff penalties if they sang religious songs, engaged in private worship, or visited neighboring Lutheran villages for Sunday services. All Evangelical citizens had six months to abjure their faith or to sell their properties and emigrate. Catholic religious houses recovered direct administration of their goods, and the Jesuits reconsecrated the Evangelical church as a Catholic chapel and assumed responsibility over Colmar’s schools. Finally, only Catholics could serve in the civic regime.49 On 22 March 48 49
Wallace, Communities, 62–8. Wallace, Communities, 34–7.
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1628, the commissioners received the resignations of 24 Evangelical regime members and installed a purely Catholic body.50 Many Evangelical leaders, including four of the five magistrates, joined their pastors in seeking refuge at Calvinist Basel and Mulhouse. The remaining magistrate, Conrad Ortlieb, returned to his home town, Lutheran Riquewihr.51 Augustin Güntzer also sought refuge at Riquewihr, but was turned away because “the Colmarians are of the Calvinist religion,” and he later settled at Strasbourg.52 On the surface the confessional cleansing of Colmar seemed well under way, but from the outset the new “Catholic” regime resisted the counter-reform program. The magistrates repeatedly petitioned Outer Austrian officials at Ensisheim for delays and exemptions in applying the new regulations and, when rebuffed, appealed from Ensisheim to the Reichshofrat.53 In these negotiations, Catholic officials relied on the expertise of the Evangelical Stadtschreiber, Anton Schott, and Gerichtsschreiber, Niclaus Sandherr, whom they had retained until confessionally “suitable” replacements could be found. The Catholic magistrates’ legal appeals delayed full imposition of the new confessional order down to 1630, when stunning Swedish victories in northern Germany softened pressure from Habsburg agents. Henceforth, Colmar’s officials would not fine their Evangelical neighbors when they began visiting Lutheran villages for Sunday services.54 Throughout the counter-reform interim, the Catholic regime’s most pressing problem was quartering the imperial garrison, which sought to occupy the houses vacated by Colmar’s Evangelical refugees. Civic officials negotiated payment from exiles in Basel and elsewhere, many of whom had not relinquished their citizenship, to help defray costs, while limiting troop assignments to occupied homes.55 The Catholic regime’s “entrenched” multiconfessional behavior suggests some sympathy with Colmar’s Evangelical residents and exiles, which can be explained, in part, by the confessional composition of
50 Lorentz Espach, a Catholic councilor, noted: “Mittwoch den 22 Mertz Nauen Kalendar Anno 1628 Jar ist der alten rot allhie in der statt Collmar abgestanten worten.” Archives Départementales du Haut-Rhin [hereafter ADHR], 4G, 12, fol. 2r. 51 Fehr, Gegenreformation, 48–63, here at 52. 52 Güntzer, Biechlin, 214–5, here at 214. 53 AMC, GG 166, 3–9. 54 Adam, Kirchengeschichte, 482–3. 55 AMC, BB 52, Protocollum Missivarum, 1629–32, 322–4 and 445–6; and Fehr, Gegenreformation, 60–1.
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the regime itself. Although Schott had resigned and emigrated to Basel late in 1628, Sandherr remained. Among regime members in 1630, six of the 32 had served as Evangelical councilors, while five others had married or baptized their children in the Calvinist church and apparently abjured. Of these 11 “converts,” only two—Andreas Siebert and Matthias Glöcklin—would remain Catholics after 1632. Colmar’s Catholic magistrates came from the Catholic economic elite, but only Hans Obrecht had served in the regime before the counter-reform as guildmaster.56 To govern effectively these men needed support from experienced Evangelicals both in exile and in the city. Their dependence on Evangelicals made sense given the impossibility of expelling nearly two-thirds of the citizenry or questioning too closely the beliefs of those who remained. The Habsburg counterreform was imposed by outside force at the expense of civic claims to the ius reformandi, and it threatened Colmar’s imperial status. Confessionalizing sympathies among Catholic civic leaders had to be mixed. Moreover, the flight of committed Evangelicals had already left its mark. Householders fell by over 14 percent (1074 to 931) between 1620 and 1630. Even so, the majority who remained (497) had married or baptized their children in the Calvinist church, while the “subcutaneous” biconfessional balance in Colmar’s neighborhoods and guilds was nearly unchanged. The counter-reform had driven off Colmar’s Evangelical elite, as taxpayers assessed at over 2,000 florins fell from 54 to 25, and among merchants, from 25 to five. With their departure assessed wealth declined by nearly one-third from over 487,000 to just over 355,000 florins.57 Many found havens at Calvinist Mulhouse and Basel. When biconfessionalism returned to Colmar, would they? On 20 December 1632, faced with a Swedish siege, Colmarians attacked the imperial garrison and capitulated. The Swedes ‘restored’ Colmar’s Evangelical parish and biconfessionalism by recognizing civic Catholics’ right to worship at St. Martin’s. The new Evangelical parish, however, would develop under Strasbourg’s Lutheran tutelage, as Johannes Schmidt, president of Strasbourg’s consistory, delivered the inaugural sermon and hand-picked the new ministers.58 Despite imposition of Lutheranism from outside, Colmar’s Lutheran ministers 56
Wallace, Communities, 35–9. Wallace, Communities, 82–5. 58 In 1637 Colmar modeled its first church ordinance after Strasbourg’s. Adam, Kirchengeschichte, 486–9. 57
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would eventually integrate into the community’s elite much more deeply than their predecessors, who had formed few familial ties with their parishioners. Of the 15 Lutheran ministers, who served Colmar’s Evangelical church from 1632 to 1715, six were sons of ministers or regime members. Whether immigrants or natives, the ministers would marry into a narrow circle of elite Evangelical families.59 The density of interpersonal ties must have enhanced confessional cohesion among Lutheran elites, and these close associations would continue deep into the 18th century.60 Full integration between the ministers and elite, however, took two generations, and intra-confessional relations among Colmar’s Evangelicals remained taut. In 1638, Schmidt condemned the “poisonous and blasphemous” tone of an anonymous “crypto-Calvinist” pamphlet critiquing his inaugural sermon.61 For a time Colmar’s Evangelical magistrates tolerated “hybrid” multiconfessionalism within the Evangelical parish. Augustin Güntzer had returned to the city and held clandestine prayer meetings for Calvinist neighbors until he left the city in 1653.62 As late as 1663, the Lutheran pastor, Joachim Klein, still worried about the influence of “crypto-Calvinists” among Colmar’s political leaders.63 These residual intra-confessional tensions within the Evangelical community played out under a new political order in Alsace and at Colmar. In 1634, when French mercenaries and officials replaced the Swedes as Colmar’s “protectors”, they retained the city’s biconfessional settlement negotiated with the Swedes and confirmed it in a treaty signed at Rueil, near Paris, on 1 August 1635.64 In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia granted French officials all rights in Alsace formerly held by
59 Bopp, Geistlichen, Jost Haas (206, no. 1877); Joachim Klein (292, no. 2758); Matthäus Bardellar (38, no 180); Wilhelm Weber I (571, no. 5476); Johann Paul Ziegler (605, no. 5802); Niklaus Klein (292, no. 2759); Wilhelm Weber II (571, no. 5478); Johann Balthasar Wetzel (586, no. 5617); Andreas Burger (95, no. 724); Andreas Lichtenberger, 1687–1730 (334, no. 3161); Johann Heinrich Sprecht (591, no. 4961), Andreas Röttlin (450, no. 4329) and Johann Daniel Bär (35, no. 148). 60 Claude Muller, Colmar au XVIIIe siècle (Strasbourg: 2000), 18–21. 61 Adam, Kirchengeschichte, 484. 62 Güntzer, Biechlin, 244 and 283. 63 Julius Rathgeber (ed.), Colmar und Ludwig XIV. (1648–1715): Ein Beitrag zur elsässische Städtegeschichte im siebzehnten Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: 1873), 78. 64 André Waltz (ed.), ‘À l’ombre du lys’: correspondance diplomatique échangée entre la couronne de France et la république de Colmar, 1634–1646 (Colmar: 1935), 231–4.
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the Habsburgs, while confirming Colmar’s status as an imperial city, whose fragile autonomy, however, would depend on French recognition of Colmar’s imperial status.65 More importantly, under the treaties, biconfessionalism at Colmar was legally protected because it had existed in the confessionally normative year of 1624. After 1648 French officials assumed the Habsburgs’ role in protecting Colmar’s Catholics but lacked regional clerical allies. The prince-bishop of Basel was a foreign lord, whose diocese had suffered from the long war. There was no diocesan seminary, and the Jesuits and Capuchins had been expelled from Colmar with the imperial garrison that brought them.66 During the first decades of French rule, royal agents focused on operating within the imperial system and rebuilding the lordships acquired from the Habsburgs.67 Spared the confessional rigors of royal policy, Colmar’s Evangelicals would enjoy an “Indian summer”. Within the city the initial “Lutheran” regime that replaced its “Catholic” and “Calvinist” predecessors in 1633 was a hybrid assembly of former councilors and new men. Eleven “Calvinist” officials, who had been deposed in 1628, returned to office; seven others (of whom only four were Catholics) had begun their careers in the counter-reform regime; and three men, including Niclaus Sandherr, now served under their third confessional banner. Obristmeister Conrad Ortlieb was the only magistrate to return.68 Members of the Lutheran parish predominated in the civic regime, but, as late as 1650, 21 of Colmar’s 32 Evangelical officials had earlier married or baptized their children in the city’s Calvinist church.69 Colmar’s regime, moreover, remained marginally biconfessional as Catholics continued to serve as councilors with at least three representatives in any given regime.70 None, however, became magistrates. Between the Swedish occupation of 1633 and the French conquest in 1673, Colmar’s Evangelical magistrates increasingly recruited their successors from a pool of legal professionals from the surrounding
65 Christian Ohler, Zwischen Frankreich und dem Reich: Die elsässische Dekapolis nach dem Westfälischen Frieden (Frankfurt: 2002), 48–55. 66 André Schaer, Le clergé paroissial catholique en Haute Alsace sous l’ancien régime, 1648–1789 (Paris: 1966), 109–20. 67 Georges Livet, L’Intendance d’Alsace de la Guerre de Trente Ans à la mort de Louis XIV (1634–1715), 2nd ed. (Strasbourg: 1991), 175–328. 68 Wallace, Communities, 37–41, members listed at 40. 69 Wallace, Communities, 39. 70 Wallace, Communities, 133–7.
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Alsatian, Lutheran lordships. Nine of the 21 magistrates came from Horbourg-Riquewihr, and Colmar’s leading politician in the 1640s and 1650s, Johann Heinrich Mogg, had served as an official for the neighboring Lutheran counts von Rappoltstein.71 The influence of Lutheran immigrants was most evident in their tenure as Obristmeister in 34 of the 45 regimes between 1633 and 1679. The contraction of political power into the hands of a regional Lutheran professional elite coincided with the integration through marriage and recruitment of the Lutheran ministers among elite families, as the parish and the regime became closely intertwined. In 1664 the secretary to the French Reichslandvogt of Haguenau argued that “this oligarchy has lasted since the war. It is time to cut its roots and save the citizens from magisterial slavery.”72 When the opportunity came a decade later, French officials would undermine the Lutheran magistrates’ power and end their confessional exclusiveness. As the new Lutheran elite secured their political dominance and set a Lutheran confessional stamp on their parish, the changing political and confessional conditions made an impact on the civic community. The restoration of the Evangelical parish encouraged at least 41 refugee householders to return between 1633 and 1640. Their presence was demographically critical as disease and famine in the late 1630s reduced male householders at Colmar by nearly half. In 1640, Evangelical refugees accounted for 7.3 percent of taxpayers and 18 percent of taxable wealth.73 However, Colmar’s Calvinist merchants and magistrates did not return to join the Lutheran parish, and householders assessed above 2,000 florins would remain in the 20s—half the prewar level—until the French conquest.74 Colmar would not recover its pre-war population until the 1670s, but the post-war distribution of Catholics and Evangelicals in Colmar’s guilds, neighborhoods, and tax brackets generally resembled pre-war patterns. Nevertheless, Lutheran dominance in the city was growing. In 1670, Lutherans accounted for nearly 70 percent of all householders with Catholics at 24 percent. Evangelicals comprised a majority in every guild except Ackerleute, and even among Colmar’s tenant
71
Wallace, Communities, 128–33, table on 129. Georges Livet (ed.), Le Duc Mazarin gouverneur d’Alsace (1661–1713): Lettres et documents inédits (Strasbourg: 1954), 150. 73 Wallace, Communities, 85. 74 Wallace, Communities, 172. 72
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farmers the Catholic majority was smaller. Two tiny tax districts in the city’s center had become exclusively Lutheran for the first time, but elsewhere pre-war, biconfessional residential patterns remained. Most Colmarian had neighbors who attended the other church. Lutherans comprised a greater portion of Colmar’s richest householders (21 of 24 assessed over 2,000 florins), but in other tax brackets, the confessional mix roughly matched the population as a whole.75 The growing power of the Lutherans triggered some inter-confessional tensions. In 1644, Colmar’s Catholics complained to French officials that their widows felt pressure to marry Evangelicals while Lutheran magistrates had assigned Evangelical guardians to Catholic orphans. In response, the magistrates promised royal officials to protect Colmar’s Catholics “as the king protected them”.76 In 1658, Lutheran officials re-opened St. Peter’s priory church for Lutheran services to accommodate the growing community of faith. In the process, they transferred two large bells from St. Martin’s to their new church, triggering an angry sermon from the dean of the chapter and a response from the pulpit by the Lutheran pastor. The magistrates enjoined all preachers to observe civic peace, and the bells remained at St. Peter’s. Prior to the French conquest, the imperial city of Colmar had become increasingly Lutheran with an enfeebled Catholic minority. Colmar’s demographic recovery depended on immigration, and here the divergence between the two parishes is clear. Catholic householders rebounded from a low of 174 in 1640 to 210 in 1650, but then stagnated, with only 221 Catholic householders two decades later. Meanwhile, Lutheran households nearly doubled from 348 in 1640 to 439 in 1650 and 637 in 1670. In that time frame the Catholic parish welcomed only 57 immigrant householders; and as was true earlier, nearly all came from neighboring Catholic villages. For the same period, Colmar’s increasingly Lutheran parish attracted 289 immigrant householders. Switzerland continued to provide a little more than a tenth (34), although craftsmen from the Bernese Oberland had replaced merchants.77 Alsace now served as the principal reservoir for Lutheran immigrants, accounting for nearly 53 percent (153), well above the pre-war share of 34 percent. Among Alsatian immigrants 75
Wallace, Communities, 163–74. AMC, GG 167, 10–1. 77 Adding Francophone and Rhenish migrants, who might have Calvinist leanings, raises the share to 17 percent (50/289). None entered Colmar’s economic or political elite. 76
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after 1632, Lutheran Strasbourg provided 39, more than one-quarter, as a cohort of Strasbourg merchants, craftsmen, and officials settled in Colmar, with several serving in the civic regime.78 By 1670 Colmar’s Lutheran religious, political and social elite had links to all the Lutheran centers in Alsace. Parity and New Horizons On 4 August 1680, the French intendant in Alsace, Jacques de la Grange, ordered Colmar’s Lutheran officials to appoint a Catholic magistrate and four Catholic councilors to fill vacancies for the upcoming election. When they refused, he disbanded Colmar’s regime. On 3 October, the Conseil d’État decreed that, as a biconfessional city, Colmar must observe the imperial practice of “co-equal” confessional parity, where all civic boards had equal confessional representation or where incumbents in individual offices alternated between confessions.79 Threatened with wholesale depositions, Colmar’s Lutheran leaders agreed to appoint Catholics and negotiated a gradual implementation of parity through Catholic replacements on the death or retirement of Lutheran incumbents. Confessional parity—mandated for a few imperial cities in 1648 but unknown in the interior of France—became the foundation of Louis XIV’s counter-reform at Colmar.80 Since Colmar’s Reformation the civic regime had never been confessionally exclusive, but the demand for parity, initiated by Colmar’s Catholic citizens, marked a dramatic shift in power relations between civic Catholics and Lutherans.81 To facilitate confessional balance, royal officials reduced council membership to 20, and in principle each guild now provided one Catholic and one Lutheran councilor. By forcing Catholic appointments, royal pressure initially broadened the social base of regime recruitment, as early Catholic candidates were civic guildsmen.82 Moreover, establishing confessional parity and reducing the council to 20 members ended Lutheran recruitment into
78
Wallace, Communities, 150–1. AMC, BB 24, 10. 80 Wallace, Communities, 182–6. On parity in Lutheran Strasbourg, see Paul Greissler, La Class politique dirigeante à Strasbourg, 1650–1750 (Strasbourg: 1987), 121– 30 and 165–7. 81 AMC, BB 19, 1–2. 82 Wallace, Communities, 183. 79
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the regime for nearly a generation. Besides losing their confessional monopoly, Colmar’s Lutheran magistrates found their authority circumscribed. In 1686, the king appointed Catholic préteurs royaux to head the principal civic regimes in Alsace. Colmar’s magistrates would require his approval on any major decision. Parity had divided Colmar’s regime confessionally; but when it faced three major political crises, from above in the mid-1690s and 1720 and from below in 1711, Catholic and Lutheran officials rallied together to defend their privileges and official parity. An edict in 1692, known as the Reunion of Charges, created a set of venal offices that would supplant the functions of civic regimes throughout France. To defend their posts, Colmar’s Lutheran and Catholic officials joined together to loan monies to the city to purchase and suppress these new offices.83 In the second crisis of 1711, a Lutheran apothecary and Kirchenpfleger, Johann Jacob Sonntag, rallied a party of nearly 100 householders, mostly German-speaking master artisans of both confessions, calling for the reinstitution of triennial elections, decreed by the king in the 1680s but suspended as part of suppressing the Reunion of Charges. Again the biconfessional regime successfully defended its privileges against its biconfessional opponents.84 Finally, in 1720, royal officials sought to reduce the council from 20 members to ten. The magistrates and councilors of both confessions successfully defended the size of the council and the continuation of confessional parity within the regime, targeting as “expendable” only those offices held by Catholics under the patronage of the city’s French commandant, where confessional parity did not apply.85 Such instances of cross-confessional cooperation notwithstanding, confessional tensions remained down to the French Revolution as Lutheran magistrates resisted sporadic Catholic efforts to undermine parity or the practice of alternating confessional appointments by citing the royal decrees that had ended the Lutherans dominance in civic government.86 French rule transformed Colmar from Lutheran-dominated, imperial city to a Catholic-dominated, French provincial administrative center, and this transformation was felt by both confessions throughout
83
Wallace, Communities, 190–8. Peter G. Wallace, “Civic Politics and Civic Values in Colmar, 1648–1715,” French Historical Studies 18 (1994): 907–37, here at 933–4. 85 Wallace, Communities, 225–6. 86 Muller, Colmar, 119–22. 84
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the community. According to census data gathered by French officials, households at Colmar rose from 930 in 1683 to 1,877 by 1718. In that year 516 householders were non-citizens, while 80 more households were directly tied to the Conseil souverain and 36 others belonged to other royal provincial officials.87 In many ways the traditional civic community of taxpaying citizens had become encased by a second community that lived at Colmar without participating in civic life.88 Overall Catholic baptisms surpassed Lutheran in the 1690s and marriages in the first decade of the 18th century.89 Among Colmar’s citizens, Lutheran households grew from 529 in 1680 to 721 in 1720 (36 percent); Catholics more than doubled from 206 to 477. Lutherans remained the majority within the civic community deep into the 18th century, while many in the French-speaking, Catholic elite moved in circles of privilege “above” civic life. Growth for both parishes relied on immigration, and under French rule confessional patterns of immigration among citizens changed dramatically. Between 1631 and 1680, of the 939 new Lutheran householders with identifiable geographic origins, immigrants accounted for 30 percent (289). From 1681 to 1730, among 1,208 new Lutheran householders with known origins, only 20 percent (250) were immigrants. The parish continued to attract Alsatians (129 or 51.6 percent) and Swiss (30 or 12 percent) in proportions comparable to the past until Louis XV prohibited “foreign” non-Catholics from purchasing citizenship in Alsace in 1729. Throughout the 18th century Evangelical immigrants from Switzerland and the Empire continued to enter Colmar’s guilds, but in much smaller numbers.90 Among Colmar’s Catholics, French rule completely transformed the volume and scope of immigration, making it the main engine of the parish’s demographic growth. Between 1631 and 1680, of 297 new Catholic householders with known geographical origins, 57 (19 percent) were immigrants, with nearly half (28) from villages in Upper Alsace. Between 1681 and 1730, 869 new Catholics householders have known origins, of whom 319 (37 percent) were immigrants, nearly six times as many as the 87
AMC, AA 171, 1–10. Wallace, Communities, 234–5. 89 Wallace, Communities, 238–9. 90 For full lists, see Wallace, Communities, 152 and 241. On Louis XV’s decree, see Adam, Kirchengeschichte, 490. On 18th-century Evangelical immigration, see Jean Bachschmidt (ed.), Le Livre des Bourgeois de Colmar 1660–1789 (Colmar: 1985), 328–82. 88
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previous half-century. Alsace provided more than one-third (119). A significant number came from Southwestern Germany (73) and Switzerland (18), and 49 immigrants came from the kingdom’s interior.91 They were in addition to the more than 100 French-speaking noble households privileged before the fisc. French rule was slowing transforming biconfessional Colmar from a Lutheran dominated imperial city to a Catholic dominated provincial administrative center. Under French sovereignty Colmar’s guilds grew to meet the demands of a growing population and new markets, and for the first time the bulk of growth favored Catholics. Between 1680 and 1720, Lutheran guild membership grew slightly more than one-third from 504 to 697 guildsmen. Over the same decades Catholic guild membership mushroomed from 172 to 427 (148 percent). Catholics would remain the minority among Colmar’s guildsmen into the late 18th century, but by 1720 Catholics comprised at least 20 percent in every guild. They had recovered their majorities in the rural guilds and had gained majorities among Colmar’s millers, butchers, and fishermen.92 Catholic guildsmen had acquired contracts to supply royal garrisons in the city and at the frontier.93 Moreover, as new French styles in dress, furnishings, and architecture became popular, French-speaking Catholics comprised a growing number of Colmar’s clothiers, wig makers, jewelers, masons, and carpenters. The growth of Catholics in these fields made it possible for Colmarians to handle most if not all of their market transactions with co-religionists and may, as it did at Augsburg, have added to confessional alienation within the civic community.94 Although the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes disbanded Huguenot communities in the kingdom’s interior, the Peace of Westphalia protected the proprietary and religious rights of Alsatian Evangelicals.95 Nevertheless, beginning in the late 1670s, Louis XIV’s provincial agents implemented an aggressive counter-reform program.96 In December
91
Wallace, Communities, 152, 241. Wallace, Communities, 250–1. 93 AMC, EE 174, 1–13. 94 François, Grenze, 133–4. 95 The Westphalian treaties defined Alsatian inter-confessional policies into the 19th century. Claude Muller and Bernard Vogler, Catholiques et protestants en Alsace: le Simultaneum de 1802 à 1982 (Strasbourg: 1983), 16–17. 96 Livet, L’Intendance, 440–4. Schaer, Le clergé, 180–97; and Louis Châtellier, Tradition chrétienne et renouveau catholique dans l’ancien diocèse de Strasbourg (Paris: 1981), 307–26. 92
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1679, the intendant banned Lutheran services at St. Peter’s. The following September on a “Wednesday morning,” the French commandant announced the return of the Gregorian calendar by nailing the decree on the Lutheran church door during Sunday services, and henceforth, Colmar’s Lutherans would need to honor Catholic holy days. Shrines and crucifixes gradually began to reappear throughout the city. In 1683, Lutheran magistrates advised their co-religionists to stay indoors after Catholics youths had beaten Lutherans, who refused to kneel for the passing monstrance during Colmar’s first Corpus Christi procession in more than 50 years. Colmar’s Catholic had regained the streets to celebrate their faith, while Lutherans felt increasingly confined to private worship.97 Since Colmar’s Reformation, its Evangelical church had been the civic church. French rule ended the Lutheran church’s privileged place within the civic community, but the residue of ties between the regime and the parish endured. The senior Lutheran magistrate remained as head of the consistory.98 Lutheran ministers and schoolteachers continued to receive salaries and subsidized lodging from the municipal budget, and the regime paid a comparable subsidy to the Jesuits who established a school at Colmar in 1698.99 As the century progressed fear of confessional oppression would dampen the Lutheran’s centennial celebration of the Swedish restoration in 1732 and the bi-centennial of Colmar’s Reformation in 1775.100 French presence stimulated a spiritual revival among Colmar’s Catholic clergy and the first expressions of Baroque Catholic piety among the laity. In 1698, Swiss Capuchins had received royal permission to found a house in the city and assumed responsibility for preaching at St. Martin’s in German and in French. That same year the Jesuits settled at St. Peter’s priory and established a College there. Meanwhile Colmar’s long languishing Augustinian and Dominican houses began baroque-style renovations on their churches. The census of 1709 counted 68 priests and 72 nuns in Colmar’s religious houses, a significant increase from earlier decades. Catholic jurists in the Conseil souverain richly endowed the Augustinian chapel and used it as their private graveyard, establishing what might be seen as exclusively noble,
97
Adam, Kirchengeschichte, 490–1. Henri Strohl, Le Protestantisme en Alsace (Strasbourg: 1950), 277–8. 99 In 1715 the civic regime paid the Protestant ministers 1,590 livres and a pension of 1,800 livres to the Jesuits, AMC, CC 145, 1715, fol. 3v. 100 Adam, Kirchengeschichte, 495. 98
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“concentric” confessional space, while the civic Catholic elite turned to the Dominicans for their final resting place and commemorative masses.101 The canons of St. Martin’s, whose religious indifference had done much to damage Catholic interests before 1680, also embraced the call for religious reforms.102 Meanwhile the belated establishment of a diocesan seminary in 1718 for the bishopric of Basel eventually improved the quality, training, and esprit de corps among parish clergy at Colmar and the surrounding villages.103 The most visible sign of Colmar’s Catholic revival was the Marian congregation founded by the Jesuits in 1730. It had 400 members in 1763 and survived the suppression of the order.104 Despite pressures from French officials, Colmar’s Lutheran parish showed resiliency and energy. In the 1680s, Louis XIV offered moratoria on taxes for converts, prohibited mixed marriages, and ordered all children in such households to be raised Catholic. Of over 1,320 Lutheran householders who paid taxes in Colmar between 1680 and 1730, only 26 converted (less than 2 percent).105 At the same time, Colmar’s Lutherans financed a complete remodeling of the interior of their church. In 1698, they moved the organ to the balcony above the communion table and built an elaborately sculpted pulpit. Two years later, donors purchased new candelabra to illuminate the nave. In 1709, the consistory commissioned 50 brightly colored paintings from the Strasbourg artist, Johann Friedrich Wülckhen, which depicted dramatic events from the New Testament and marked a shift to increased ornamentation in Alsatian Lutheran churches. In the same year, the gymnasiarch, Johann Paul Ziegler, updated the hymnal and produced a new catechism the following year, which would run through several 18th-century editions.106 Finally in 1729, the consistory financed the construction of a beautiful new organ.107 Political patronage and pressure heightened confessional awareness and identification, thickening “invisible barriers” between the two confessions.
101
Muller, Colmar, 73–101. Wallace, Communities, 245–6. 103 Schaer, Clergé, 109–20. 104 Louis Châtellier, Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society (Cambridge: 1987), 197f. 105 Wallace, Communities, 245–6. 106 Adam, Kirchengeschichte, 495–6. 107 Muller, Colmar, 21–2; cf. François, Grenze, 133–40. 102
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In 1715 Louis XIV erected a visible barrier that would symbolize divisions between Colmar’s confessional communities into the modern era. Central to Louis XIV’s counter-reform program in Alsace was the simultaneum—the enforced sharing of Lutheran churches by Catholics.108 On 11 March, François Dietremann, the préteur royal of Colmar, led a party of Catholic and Lutheran officials into the choir of Colmar’s Lutheran church and claimed it for the Catholics to reconsecrate as a chapel for the adjacent civic and newly-built royal hospitals.109 He ordered a wall to be built to seal off the choir from the nave and assigned the responsibility for paying the chaplain and furnishing the chapel to the canons of St. Martin’s.110 Over the next year, workmen refurbished the new chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity and walled off the two churches.111 With the death of Louis XIV, Colmar’s Lutheran magistrates protested against the wall to the intendant, the provincial governor, and ultimately Versailles. Colmar’s Catholics responded with a petition to preserve the chapel. According to the Lutherans, their parish had always been Lutheran, true to the Augsburg Confession, and thus protected by the Peace of Augsburg. They described Colmar’s Reformation as favored by the majority of Colmarians and carried through—as in the poem above—by Buob, Goll, and Linck. In their account, the Swedes had rescued Colmar’s Lutherans and restored their church, their right to which Louis XIII had guaranteed through the treaty of Rueil in 1635. Finally, Lutherans had occupied the entire building in 1624 and, given the Westphalian guidelines, should be entitled to it.112 In their account, the Catholics presented reform as the result of outside instigators headed by Linck, who took over the former Franciscan church, which was only empty “due to lack of clergy,” and invited his own minister to preach there. The Catholics “being deprived of ministers . . . became
108
On the simultaneum and imperial law, see Christoph Schäfer, Das Simultaneum: Ein staatskirchenrechtliches, politisches und theologisches Problem des Alten Reiches (New York: 1995); for Alsace, see Claude Muller, “Ébauche d’un répertoire des églises mixtes en Alsace,” Saisons d’Alsace 102 (1988): 27–121; and Muller and Vogler, Catholiques et Protestants, 9–10. Introducing Catholic worship into Protestant communities led to mass conversions in several Lower Alsatian villages. Châtellier, Tradition, 290. 109 AMC, GG 172, 13, fol. 1. 110 AMC, GG 172, 13, fol. 2r. Disputes over the appointment and provisions of the chaplain would sour relations among Catholics throughout the 18th century. AMC, GG 172, 36–46 & 70–75. 111 AMC, GG 172, 26. Nearly one-third of 4,300 livres spent went to new bells. 112 ADHR, 101 J, 1278, 8.
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accustomed to going to hear this minister . . . unaware of the poison of his doctrine, and by this means a number embraced this sect.” Linck then displaced Catholic officials with his Lutheran allies and began “afflicting and tormenting the Catholics on every occasion”.113 For the Catholics, Ferdinand II was the savior whose efforts were undermined by the “treachery” of Lutheran Colmarians who “slaughtered” the imperial garrison and put themselves under Swedish protection.114 The Catholics countered the Lutheran claim to protection under the Peace of Augsburg by arguing that there were no Lutherans at Colmar in 1555. Nor did the Peace of Westphalia apply, because “Lutherans were in possession [of their church] through bad faith and by violence that had been condemned by various decrees of the emperor.”115 Whether persuaded by these arguments or not, the Regents for Louis XV ordered the wall and chapel to remain. It became a mnemonic symbol of Colmar’s confessional barriers, which Lutherans would continue to protest down to 1789.116 Conclusion From its Reformation in 1575 to the French Revolution, Colmar was officially biconfessional except for a brief Habsburg counter-reform interim from 1628 to 1632. In this essay I have tried to make two points. First, Colmar’s Evangelical confessional identity was shifting and contested deep into the 17th century. Evangelical officials insisted throughout that they honored the Confession of Augsburg, but their understanding of the Confession of Augsburg shifted from Philippist Lutheranism to Swiss Reformed Calvinism to Orthodox Lutheranism between the 1590s and 1660s. After 1673, French rule reinforced German Lutheran identity among Colmar’s Evangelicals, alienating them from the new Catholic regime and from their own confessionally complex past. Second, reform for Colmar’s Catholics was delayed and driven by counter-reform measures initiated by external powers. Only
113 Bibliothèque Municipale de Colmar [hereafter BMC], Fonds Chauffour, MS 906, fol. 2v. 114 BMC, Fonds Chauffour, MS 906, fol. 2v–3r. 115 BMC, Fonds Chauffour, MS 906, fol. 4r–5v, here at 4v. 116 Erich Pelzer (ed.), Les Cahiers de plaintes et doléances de la Haute-Alsace 1789 (Guebwiller: 1993), 257–63, here at 258.
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in the 18th century would reformed Catholicism emerge at Colmar in expressions of baroque piety. In truth, Colmar was multiconfessional before its Reformation, and between 1550 and 1750, Colmar’s Catholics and Evangelicals practiced aspects of David Luebke’s six categories for multiconfessional relations. Prior to the reform, the fledging Evangelical party was “subcutaneous,” protected by sympathizers within the civic regime and spiritually nurtured through “liminal” ties with Horbourg-Riquewihr. In 1575 Colmar’s magistrates, citing the ius reformandi and supported in this claim by the civic guildsmen, authorized an Evangelical parish. Afterward Colmar’s Catholics could freely attend their church, but the Evangelical magistrates restricted Catholic public rituals and marginalized the Catholics’ political involvement. Confessional relations in the imperial city of Colmar were never “co-equal”. Beyond the city walls Colmar’s Evangelical church was challenged by Catholic authorities, who questioned its legality under the religious Peace of Augsburg. Meanwhile within the Evangelical parish, political leaders sought to maintain a “hybrid” convivium between Orthodox Lutheran and Philippist factions in the confessional space provided by the Deklarationsschrift. By the early 17th century, Colmar’s Evangelical ministry had become predominantly Calvinist as had a significant portion of the political and economic elite. Just the same, the pastors and magistrates had to tolerate Lutherans within the parish or risk exposing their increasing alienation from the Augsburg Confession. In 1628 when an imperial commission denied the legal status of Colmar’s Evangelical parish and enforced a counter-reform, official biconfessionalism ended temporarily. The Habsburg-imposed “Catholic” regime nonetheless tolerated a “subcutaneous” Evangelical majority in part because the city could not afford a mass exodus and in part because the regime continued to depend on the guidance of former Evangelical officials. I would argue that the confessional mix within the nominally “Catholic” regime reflected “entrenched” multiconfessionalism, with the desire to maintain civic autonomy and norms fostering confessional tolerance. In 1632 Swedish troops restored biconfessionalism to Colmar, and relations between Catholics and the new Lutheran community assumed many of the early 17th-century patterns. Lutheran ministers, however, were little interested in tolerating “hybridity”, but a “subcutaneous” Calvinist cell survived for a time thanks to residual support within the regime. The Peace of Westphalia legalized Colmar’s biconfessionalism for the first time. The French conquest of Colmar
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could not undermine the Westphalian confessional guarantees. In the 1680s French officials established “co-equal” confessional relations by instituting confessional parity in civic governance. French rule also strengthened Lutheran confessional solidarity while stimulating the first local expressions of reformed Catholicism for clergy and laity. Finally, the forced implementation of the simultaneum in Colmar’s Lutheran church erected a visible border between the two confessions. In exploring imperial multiconfessionalism in any local context, one inevitably uncovers the complexities of early modern religious life.
PART FOUR
FRANCE
FRANCE: AN OVERVIEW Keith P. Luria The relations between early-modern France’s Christian groups, Catholic and Reformed, present historians with a conundrum. How are we to explain a situation in which the two groups were fiercely hostile and perpetrated horrific violence one on another while simultaneously coexisting peacefully in numerous communities throughout the kingdom? More often than not, historians have focused either on the confessional violence or on the ways Catholics and Huguenots found to live together. The result has left us with a double image of confessional relations. On one side, fears ran deep; each group saw the other as menacing salvation, social cohesion, and political stability. The gulf between them provoked horrible brutality. On the other, Catholic and Huguenot neighbors appeared capable of limiting conflict and interacting peacefully on a daily basis. They lived side-by-side, did business together, served jointly in civic government, married each other, and shared communal burial grounds. The current challenge for historians is to find ways to explain both bitter divisions and peaceful coexistence. The search for such explanations is very much a work in progress, but we can look at both conflict and coexistence in France’s confessional relations, the basis for each, and the state’s role in promoting conflict at some times and coexistence at others.1 Conflict Although this is not the place for a detailed account of the French Reformation, it is useful to trace its broad outlines to understand how religious conflict grew. Luther’s works began appearing in Parisian bookshops as early as 1519, and the Sorbonne condemned his ideas in
1 See Keith P. Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in EarlyModern France (Washington, DC: 2005); Philip Benedict, “Un roi, une loi, deux fois: Parameters for the History of Catholic-Reformed Coexistence in France, 1555–1685” in Philip Benedict (ed.), The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, 1600–1685 (Aldershot: 2001), 279–308, see 300.
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1521. Royal law made possession of his books a crime.2 But there were also local sources of reformist ideas in the work of Christian humanists such as Jacques Lefèbvre d’Étaples, whose studies of scripture led him to question purgatory and the cult of saints, and who taught that Christ’s sacrifice counted for more in the redemption of sinners than their good works or intercessory prayers. Humanist reformers found encouragement and protection from other figures, for example, Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet, who promoted pastoral reforms in his diocese of Meaux, and Marguerite of Navarre, sister of King François I, who gathered humanists at her court and participated in the movement with her own evangelical writings. Reaction came from religious orders, such as the Franciscans, who opposed Briçonnet’s efforts in Meaux, and from the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris, both of which opposed the spread of reformist ideas. Beginning in the 1520s, heresy trials in the parlements reveal the spread of evangelical ideas and the attempts to repress them.3 With the establishment of Reformed worship in Geneva in the 1530s and the setting up of French printers there, Protestant propaganda in France became more confrontational. On 18 October 1534 placards carrying a message by Antoine Marcourt, denouncing the Catholic mass, appeared simultaneously in Paris and elsewhere. The provocative act brought down another wave of repression on those suspected of heresy. Many fled the kingdom, including Jean Calvin, who two years later published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, with its harsh critique of Catholic doctrine and adamant call for true believers to separate themselves from the abominations of the Roman Church. In 1543, at François I’s order, the Sorbonne drew up articles of Catholic belief, creating for the first time a list of orthodox positions on theological and ecclesiastical matters. The line being drawn between the faiths in France was growing clearer and more rigid. The confessional confrontation grew more violent, as the new French churches increasingly aligned themselves with Calvin’s reform in the 1540s, and as the Genevan Church began to supply minis-
2 Philip Benedict and Virginia Reinburg, “Religion and the Sacred” in Mack P. Holt (ed.) Renaissance and Reformation France, (Short Oxford History of France) (Oxford: 2002), 119–146, see 136. 3 William Monter, Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by SixteenthCentury Parlements (Cambridge, MA: 1999); Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (Oxford: 1987), 32–38.
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ters for clandestine congregations in France. Encouraged by popular preachers, Catholics mobilized to defend the elements of their faith under attack. They founded new confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament to counter Reformed opposition to the doctrine of the real presence and gathered in the streets to force passers-by to honor the host or statues of the Virgin. The king, who had patronized humanist evangelicals, now appeared in penitential processions organized to honor the consecrated host.4 Royal judges pursued suspected heretics more vigorously, and executions for heresy tripled over the course of the 1540s.5 Henri II, who succeeded François I in 1547, was even more assiduous than his father in pursuing religious dissidents. The repression did not succeed, and by the mid-1550s, with Calvin’s prompting, Huguenots began to organize churches on the Genevan model with ministers, consistories, and the administration of the sacraments. Their growth was spectacular. In 1559, the French Reformed Church organized its first national synod and published a “Confession of Faith.” By 1562 France may have had as many as 1,000 such congregations with members numbering some 1.5–2 million people (about 10 percent of the population). They were located throughout the country but were especially concentrated in the west and south, where royal authority was weakest. The deepening rift between members of the two churches, the repression, and the increasing number of provocative acts by both sides made conflict appear inevitable, or at least it has often seemed so to historians. The influx of nobles into the Reformed Church brought it a group of fighters who combined their concern for defending the faith with their clan rivalries and political ambitions. The unexpected death of Henri II in 1559 left the monarchy in a weak state and opened political space for the machinations of powerful aristocratic leaders. The sparks that set off the first war were not long in coming: in 1560 at Amboise, the failed Huguenot conspiracy to take control of the young king, François II; that monarch’s death later the same year; the failure of a 1561 conference at Poissy to reunite the churches; and at Vassy the massacre of Huguenots by troops of the Catholic leader, the
4
Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in SixteenthCentury Paris (Oxford: 1991), 45–47; Benedict and Reinburg, “Religion and the Sacred,” 139, 145. 5 Benedict and Reinburg, “Religion and the Sacred,” 139.
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Duke of Guise in March 1562. In that same month war broke out, the first of eight that would plague the kingdom until 1598. There is no need here to recount the history of these military conflicts.6 But what must be noted is the degree of and explanations for the street violence in French cities and towns. It reached an extraordinary level. Huguenots attacked both members of the Catholic clergy and sacred objects—saints’ images, relics, and the consecrated host. They assaulted Catholic churches and religious houses. Catholics destroyed French Bibles, central to Reformed worship, and they humiliated and massacred Huguenots in an effort to rid their society of heresy’s polluting effects. The spiral of violence culminated in the infamous 1572 massacre of Huguenots on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in Paris, which was echoed over the succeeding weeks in a number of other French cities. The extent and nature of the violence have spawned a variety of historical interpretations. Some scholars have highlighted economic motives, linking the violence to rises in grain prices. Others have pointed to class tensions, based on supposed social differences between the religious groups that do not always stand up under close examination. Yet others have seen the outbursts as evidence of an enduring primitive, atavistic, and irrational fear of the other. More successful and more influential interpretations of the violence, found in the work of scholars like Natalie Zemon Davis, Denis Crouzet, and Barbara Diefendorf, have tied the violence to the particulars of 16th-century French social, political, and religious life and to what Mack Holt has described as the “two cultures of Protestantism and Catholicism.”7 Davis posed the question of how the perpetrators could legitimize such horrors in their own minds and found the answer in their adoption of the legal and religious rituals with which they were familiar. Violence did not spring out of primitive impulses but made use of the available forms of punishment and purification to respond to a dread of social pollution. Rioters saw themselves as taking on the roles both of clergy, ridding communities of sin, and of magistrates, sentencing and executing those who were dangerous to their communities. Fire and water purified the community as corpses were burned or
6 For a history of the period, see Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562– 1629, 2nd edition (Cambridge, UK: 2005). 7 Holt, French Wars of Religion, 87.
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“baptized” by being thrown in rivers. For Catholics the “rites of violence” dehumanized heretics and thus permitted their extermination. For Huguenots the sources of sin and pollution were found among the “superstitious” objects used in Catholic worship and among the Catholic clergy, whom Reformed propaganda had repeatedly accused of sexual transgressions.8 Diefendorf, in her study of religious violence in Paris culminating in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, pays close attention to political and social developments in the city and its relationship with the monarchy, but she also follows Davis in understanding violence as rooted in ritual and legal norms, and sparked by Huguenot pollution of the city’s Catholic communal identity and unity. And she shows how violence fed on violence; Catholic attacks on Huguenots often singled out previous targets and replayed the forms of earlier attacks.9 Crouzet also focuses on the particular character of 16th-century religion. He too sees the violence as growing out of opposed religious cultures, each defined by a particular understanding of its relationship with God. But hanging over the kingdom was an eschatological sense of doom that fed two sorts of violence, one the royal violence of kings who felt the need to protect the monarchy’s sacrality from heretics and the other a popular violence rooted in a fear of impending apocalypse and the need to root out pollution.10 The image that emerges from such studies is that of a country torn apart by two unalterably opposed groups, each bent on the other’s destruction. The State and Coexistence The bitterness of the division and ferocity of the violence cannot be denied, and these works have done much to explain them. And yet an alternate history is possible, one recognizing that, notwithstanding the enmity, attempts were made to avoid conflict, to reconcile the groups, or, at least, to construct a means for them to live together. As Jérémie Foa’s essay in this volume explains, the treaties and edicts that ended the wars
8 Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence” in idem., (ed.), Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: 1975), 152–187. 9 Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross. 10 Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525–vers 1610, 2 vols. (Seyssel: 1990).
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tried to create conditions for such peacemaking.11 Cultural resources existed that could help those seeking reconciliation. While one cannot claim that all these efforts were successful, they could temporarily or locally counteract the forces of division and violence. And they set the groundwork for the more successful pacification after 1598. Reconciliation and conflict resolution do not necessarily mean religious toleration, at least not in a modern and positive sense of the term. Toleration was conceivable and some argued for it—Sebastian Castellion for example. And in biconfessional communities neighbors could practice toleration by accepting one another’s right to worship in a different manner. But the state did not seek to promote religious toleration. The churches actively opposed it. And serious tensions in local life often thwarted it. For the most part, toleration still had a negative connotation: one tolerated what one could not eliminate.12 Thus toleration did not succeed. But coexistence, defined as an arrangement by which two rival and often contentious groups found ways to live together, could and did succeed, often to a surprising extent. This section will discuss the state’s efforts to foster coexistence and the ideas on which political leaders could draw to do so. I return below to the communal construction of coexistence, though the two efforts are closely linked. The best starting point is the Colloquy de Poissy, Catherine de Medici’s attempt to reconcile the churches in 1561. Serving as regent for her son, the new king Charles IX, Catherine sought a policy of moderation that would hold Catholic and Reformed extremists at bay and preserve the monarchy’s independence from powerful factions on either side of the religious divide. With the advice of the moderate chancellor, Michel de l’Hospital, she sought religious compromise by inviting to Poissy leaders from both sides (including Calvin, who did not come, and Theodore Beza, who did) to see if a way could be found to re-unite the two faiths in one church. By this point, the rival theological positions were too hard and fast for the attempt to succeed.13 But the conference gave some hope for reconciliation and offered Reformed congregations a new sense of respectability, such as
11 Jérémie Foa, “Peace Commissioners at the Beginning of the Wars of Religion: Toward an Interactionist Interpretation of the Pacification Process.” 12 On the 16th-century meaning of toleration, see Benedict, “Un roi, une loi, deux fois,” 282–83. 13 Holt, French Wars of Religion, 45–46.
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in Lyon, where following the colloquy the Reformed community felt confident enough to meet publicly for the first time.14 What lay behind Catherine’s attempt at reconciliation were French ecclesiastical traditions and the ideas of influential individuals known as the “moyenneurs” (“those in between”). Calvin devised the term to denounce those who by any “means (moyens) sought a middle way [moyenne]” between the churches.15 They espoused neither toleration nor coexistence, either of which would allow the continuation of separate churches. Instead, the moyenneurs, who included among their ranks Michel de Montaigne and his friend Étienne de la Boétie and high-ranking members of the French Catholic Church and royal advisors, such as Bishop Jean de Monluc of Valence and Cardinal Charles de Lorraine, advocated a moderate reform of the French Church in which concessions might be made to Reformed belief.16 The Church in France had always proclaimed its orthodoxy to Catholic belief, but also maintained that those beliefs guaranteed it a degree of autonomy from Rome. The concept, known as Gallicanism, dated to the conciliar disputes with the papacy of earlier centuries. But it now provided a possible way to conceive of a church governed by a national council that might institute reforms to which Protestants could agree. Once agreement was reached, the reasons for a separate church would disappear. Alain Tallon has described the attractiveness to the moyenneurs of the Anglican model of a royal reformation of the church, a notion that was current in the early 1560s and which de l’Hospital favored. The ecclesiological and theological issues were daunting, but Tallon has identified a reform program that included communion in both kinds, authorizing the use of French in the mass, singing the psalms in French, relocating images from altars, and changing baptism ceremonies.17
14
Timothy Watson, “The Reformed Church in Lyon, 1550–1572” in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, (1559–1685) (Cambridge, UK: 2002), 10–28, see 20. 15 Calvin used the Latin terms mediator and medium. See Thierry Wanegffelen, L’Édit de Nantes: Une histoire européene de la tolérance (Paris: 1998), 95. 16 Wanegffelen, Édit de Nantes, 95–101; idem, Ni Rome ni Genève: Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: 1997). 17 Tallon also demonstrates how such reform ideas ultimately failed. Alain Tallon, “Gallicanism and Religious Pluralism in France in the Sixteenth Century” in Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass, and Penny Roberts (eds.), The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France: Papers from the Exeter Conference, April 1999 (Bern: 2000), 15–30; Philip Benedict, “Un roi, une loi, deux fois,” 285.
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The intransigence of hardliners on both sides at Poissy insured that reunification would not work. But the possibility remained of constructing a biconfessional state, something which the churches and their more militant members would not readily accept, but which the queen came to see as essential to protect the monarchy. In January of 1562, the government issued the Edict of Saint Germain, which granted the Reformed Church legal, though limited, recognition. Catherine’s attempt at compromise was made clear in the preamble, which stated that the law’s purpose was “to appease the troubles and seditions over the issue of religion.”18 Reformed congregations were allowed to worship legally, though not inside town walls, and the clergy were forbidden to insult each other. Huguenot nobles gained the right to organize and protect Reformed worship on their estates. And Huguenots were required to respect Catholic regulations by, for example, not working on Catholic festival days. The limits on the Reformed community were strict, but its clergy agreed to the settlement, since, as they saw it, the requirements “did not infringe on liberty of conscience.”19 And the edict did represent a serious departure from the previous government policy of persecution. Not surprisingly, it met opposition from the Catholic ecclesiastical and military leadership and the judges of the Paris Parlement, who objected when called upon to register the law. They called on the king to fulfill his traditional role of defender of the church and exterminator of heretics, and they quoted Matthew in reminding him that “every kingdom divided against itself goes to ruin.20 The war would put an end to the Edict of Saint Germain, but the following conflicts would end in other edicts that granted more or less scope to Reformed worship depending on the military outcome of each war. As Penny Roberts’s essay in this volume explains, their enforcement in communities also varied according to the local balance
18 Quoted in Holt, French Wars of Religion, 47. See also Benedict and Reinburg, “Religion and the Sacred,” 146. 19 Quoted in Olivier Christin, “L’espace et le temps, enjeux de conflits entre les confessions” in Jacques-Olivier Boudon and Françoise Thelamon (eds.), Les chrétiens dans la ville (Mont-Saint-Aignan: 2006), 167–180, see 176. However, complaints about Huguenot artisans and shopkeepers not respecting such regulations were frequent, and during the 1560s the monarchy would compromise by insisting only that they work behind closed doors in a manner that avoided scandal. 20 Matthew 12:25 quoted in Holt, French Wars of Religion, 48.
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of power between the two sides.21 Yet each settlement had to contend with the biconfessionality of the kingdom. Philip Benedict has described the monarchy’s “twisting path” toward a legal framework for coexistence that was not so favorable to the Huguenots as to incite a violent Catholic reaction nor so unfavorable as to provoke Huguenot revolt. Catholicism remained the established faith. Reformed worship was allowed but only in certain localities. Huguenots were required to respect many Catholic practices and observances, such as not working publicly on Catholic holidays. In the public realm, Huguenots enjoyed equal access to government or professional positions and education; their security was ensured; and they were to receive impartial justice in the courts. Unlike the situation in the Holy Roman Empire, characterized by the famous phrase “cuius regio, eius religio” in which territories would be, in principle, confessionally uniform following the religion of their rulers, France would be one sovereign entity with two legallyrecognized churches. The kingdom could no longer envision itself as a unified “community of salvation,” or at least not until religious division was resolved. Those statesmen seeking to maintain peace by establishing such a politico-religious vision could draw on various, often widespread beliefs. One was the idea Erasmus had promoted that Christian love and charity should triumph over rivalry and bloodshed. Such a conviction appeared not only in the speeches and treatises of politicians but in the local discourse of people who saw Christian charity as a central part of their religious lives. Another equally straightforward notion was that peace was better than strife and more in accord with God’s wishes. But along with such general beliefs was a more specific concept that separated citizenship from religion. In arguing for the Edict of Saint Germain before the hostile Paris Parlement, Michel de l’Hospital made a distinction between “civis” and “christianus.” French Catholics and Huguenots were members of the same polity, despite their religious differences; the king, his laws, and his royal justice protected them all equally. As de l’Hospital put it, “even the excommunicate does not
21 Penny Roberts, “One Town, Two Faiths: Unity and Exclusion during the French Religious Wars.” Foa describes the interaction between central authorities and local communities in “Peace Commissioners at the Beginning of the Wars of Religion.”
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cease to be a citizen.”22 The loosely-defined group known as Politiques would rely on these ideas to argue that religious rivalry must be set aside so that the kingdom could survive. To their opponents, their contention sounded like an argument favoring political expediency over religious truth, hence the name Politiques, which their opponents gave them. But their ideas can be seen as having a religious component, in so far as they drew on notions of Christian harmony. And generally, they saw coexistence as a temporary measure lasting only until such time as the nation was re-united in one faith. We must recognize, of course, that such ideas were cultural resources put to use as part of political strategies. As Roberts’s essay in this volume shows, they did not convince everyone, and for the most part, the leadership of both churches and both armed parties would not accept them as a means to end conflict.23 For them, there could be only one religious truth, and a nation divided between the true faith and a false one could not survive. They could not countenance any temporizing with confessional and political rivals. And so, for 35 years France see-sawed back and forth between conflict and coexistence. Street violence peaked in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. But the long-drawn out war sparked by the Catholic or Holy League in the 1580s and 1590s created havoc in the country. These militant Catholics opposed first the Catholic Henri III, who ordered the assassination of the League’s leader the Duke of Guise in 1588. The king’s assassination followed the next year. The prospect of France having a Huguenot ruler, the successor Henri of Navarre, further radicalized League opposition. Moreover, the specter of social rebellion now overshadowed religious conflict in the southwest and Burgundy, as peasants, traumatized by decades of fighting, rebelled in 1593–94. The Politique argument that these conflicts threatened the very existence of the kingdom took on new potency. Reducing the last League holdouts required years, and then only Henri IV’s conversion to Catholicism put him in a position from which he could negotiate the Edict of Nantes. Even this settlement did not entirely put an end
22 Quoted in Olivier Christin, “L’Édit de Nantes: Une relecture aujoud’hui?” in Pierre Bolle (ed.), L’Édit de Nantes: Un compromise reussi? Une paix des religions en Dauphiné-Vivarais et en Europe (Grenoble: 1999), 30–40, see 34. See also Marc Venard, “Problèmes et modalities de la coexistence religieuse au XVI siècle” in idem., 14–22. 23 Roberts, “One Town, Two Faiths.”
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to the violence, and it certainly did not make confessional tensions disappear. But exhaustion from fighting and fear of social rebellion had given a new impetus to peacemaking. The edict re-established Catholicism everywhere in the country, a provision of the law aimed at localities where Huguenots had succeeded in preventing Catholic worship. They also had to return all Church properties they had appropriated. As in earlier edicts, they were obliged to respect a variety of Catholic practices concerning rules of consanguinity in marriage, paying tithes, and not working on festivals, among others.24 Reformed worship was restricted to certain localities. Huguenots could maintain temples in places where they had worshipped regularly since 1597, and they could establish them in the suburbs of one town in each bailliage or sénéchausée (court jurisdictions). But they could not do so in any town that was a bishop’s seat. Nor could they worship in Paris. The restrictions rankled, but liberty of conscience seemed assured. And the principles of equity and cocitizenship were maintained. Huguenots were to have equal access to royal government posts and town councils, as well as educational and charitable institutions. And to provide evenhanded justice, but also as a sign of the king’s important traditional role as a dispenser of justice, the edict, following upon arrangements made in earlier laws, set up in some of the parlements chambers divided between Catholic and Huguenot judges. The edict thus ensured that members of the Reformed community would not have to face only hostile magistrates when they brought cases to court. Some historians have argued that the effect of equal treatment in principle was to deny Huguenots the sorts of protections that a parity system established in certain confessionally mixed German towns, whereby the minority faith was guaranteed, for instance, a certain number of positions on city councils.25 There the effect was to deny the ability of a majority of either faith to determine a community’s religious situation. In France, the Edict of Nantes’s promise of equal access, for example to public posts, without regard for religion left the 24 For an English version of the edict, see Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henri IV: The Tyrannicide Problem and the Consolidation of the French Absolute Monarchy in the Early Seventeenth Century, trans. Joan Spencer (New York: 1973), 316–363. 25 Olivier Christin, La paix de religion: L’autonomisation de la raison politique au XVI e siècle (Paris: 1997), 87–93, 139–146; Christin, “Édit de Nantes: Une relecture aujourd’hui?,” 30–40.
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minority without any such assurance. But what the Edict of Nantes dictated was actually more complicated. It did not always insist on purely equal treatment of both sides. In certain situations, Huguenots did gain special arrangements and rights, such as the fixed number of Huguenot judges in parlementary mixed chambers. The commissioners the king sent out to apply the edict had wide ranging powers to create settlements that might favor a local minority (Reformed or Catholic). For example, in 1599 royal commissioners undertook the delicate negotiations that led to the successful reintroduction of Catholic worship in the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle. They subsequently reached arrangements that allowed Reformed worship in towns in nearby Catholic-dominated areas.26 In all these cases, they followed the edict’s general principles but had to contend with the sensitivities of locally powerful groups. In doing so, they served the larger purpose of maintaining peace and royal authority. In the most notable special arrangement under the edict, Huguenots were authorized to maintain military forces, and they were granted towns in which to establish garrisons. Permitting Huguenot places of security might seem to contradict the edict’s objective of pacifying the country. But as Pierre-Jean Souriac has argued, security towns allowed the Reformed community to protect itself, and they served as a warranty against royal and Catholic military power. In giving the minority confidence in its ability to survive, the policy might actually have served a peacemaking role.27 After the last of the religious wars, the Rohan conflicts of the 1620s, the apportioning of positions along confessional lines, as, for example, in parlements, was extended to other institutions, such as town councils or school faculties.28 But increasingly the quota system was used against Huguenots. By the early 1630s in Languedoc, Louis XIII and
26
Francis Garrisson, Essai sur les commissions d’application de l’Édit de Nantes, Première partie: Règne de Henri IV (Montpellier: 1964), 93–99. Reformed worship was permitted by right of concession, which allowed the establishment of Reformed temples in one place in each court jurisdiction. 27 Pierre-Jean Souriac, “Une solution armée de coexistence. Les places de surêté protestantes comme élément de pacification des guerres de religion” in Didier Boisson et Yves Krumenacker (eds.), La coexistence confessionelle à l’épreuve: Études sur les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans la France moderne (Chrétiens et Sociétés, Documents et Mémoires) 9 (Lyon: 2009), 51–72. 28 Raymond A. Mentzer, “L’Édit de Nantes et l’établissement de la paix en Languedoc” in Paul Mironneau and Isabelle Pébay-Clottes (eds.), Paix des armes, paix des âmes: Actes du colloque international tenu au Musée National du Château du Pau et à
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Richelieu had dictated the entry of Catholic consuls into the governments of over 60 Protestant dominated localities, including such major centers of Huguenot power as Montauban and Nîmes. And henceforth, the first consul was always to be a Catholic. Now in Protestant colleges in Montauban, Nîmes, and Castres, the principals and half the faculty would have to be Catholic.29 In Layrac (Agenais) the development went further, as Gregory Hanlon’s close study has shown. In the late-16th century, Huguenots dominated the town both socio-economically and politically. For much of the next century, the confessional groups in Layrac were able to coexist, a result of the Huguenots’ superior economic status, but also out of the town’s need for consensus in government and civic solidarity to preserve some local autonomy. In the wake of the Edict of Nantes, Layrac’s confessional groups negotiated a “concordat,” which arranged for, among other matters, the sharing of the communal cemetery. In 1603, Catholics gained entry to the consulate. Changing political circumstances later led to the Huguenots losing ground. Crown policies and the growth of a militant dévot group in Layrac would tip the balance in a Catholic direction. In 1622, in the midst of the royal campaign against Huguenot armies in the south, members of the Reformed Church were excluded from the town’s consulate. They subsequently gained readmission but would face exclusion again in 1656.30 The Edict of Nantes succeeded where its predecessors had failed; it provided a legal framework for peace that lasted for most of the 17th century. But it did not succeed in eliminating all confessional conflict. The king insisted on a policy of oubliance, a willed collective amnesia for the outrages of the past. Courts would no longer hear cases concerning violence committed in the name of religion during the wars.31 But French Catholics and Huguenots did not so easily forget the past. Philip Benedict has shown how its memory was kept alive. Huguenots
l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour les, 8, 9, 10 et 11 octobre 1998 (Paris: 2000), 295–301, see 295, 300. 29 Stéphane Capot, Justice et religion en Languedoc au temps de l’Édit de Nantes: La Chambre de l’Édit de Castres (1579–1679) (Paris: 1998), 74, 106. 30 Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia: 1993), 40, 41, 45, 51, 52, 67. 31 Diane C. Margolf, Religion and Royal Justice in Early-Modern France: The Paris Chambre de l’Edit, 1598–1665 (Sixteenth Century Studies & Essays) 67 (Kirksville, MO: 2003), 75–98.
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printed historical calendars that dwelled on the events of the wars, especially on incidents in which their predecessors were victimized, though they also included Henri IV’s military victories. The calendars contributed to a distinct confessional memory and reinforced the Reformed community’s sense of itself as the beleaguered “petit troupeau.” Catholics kept their own memory of the wars alive with processions, commemorating the deliverance of cities from Huguenot surprise attacks or sieges during the wars, even though such celebrations contravened the principle of oubliance.32 Raw memories contributed to interconfessional tensions, but so did continuing conflicts that could envenom their relations. Confessional confrontations and violence did not disappear. In the south, Huguenot nobles, especially during the 1620s, committed acts of iconoclasm, seized church property, and forced conversions. Catholic nobles responded by demolishing temples and preventing Huguenots from using civic spaces. Riots were less frequent than during the 16thcentury wars, but they did occur. Brittany witnessed anti-Protestant pogroms at Rennes and Vitré, the assassination of a minister, and the destruction of temples. In many places, Catholic seigneurs obstructed Reformed worship. Conflict was especially sharp during the renewed religious wars of the 1620s, but the return of peace did not prevent further troubles, and violence flared again prior to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.33 But as long as the French state sought to maintain a pacified, biconfessional kingdom, confessional rivalry more often found its outlets in polemical publications, lawsuits, and complaints to the royal government than on battlefields and city streets. Coexistence could come under severe strain, but the Edict of Nantes provided a basis for it that combined principles of co-citizenship, equity, and impartial justice and that supported the careful apportioning of public positions and
32 Philip Benedict, “Divided Memories? Historical Calendars, Commemorative Processions and the Recollection of the Wars of Religion during the Ancien Régime,” French History 22 (2008): 381–405. 33 Benedict, “Un roi, une loi, deux fois,” 302; Jean-Yves Carluer, “L’Édit de Nantes en Bretagne” in Guy Saupin, Rémi Fabre and Michel Launay (eds.), La Tolérance: Colloque international de Nantes (mai 1998) (Rennes: 1999), 29–40; Brian Sandberg, “ ‘The Furious Persecutions that God’s Churches Suffer in This Region’: Religious Violence and Coercion in Early Seventeenth-Century France” in Barry Rothaus (ed.), Proceedings of the Western Society for French History: Selected Papers of the 2001 Annual Meeting (Greeley, CO: 2003), 42–52.
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power. The majority saw its faith re-established throughout the kingdom, while the minority gained protection and freedom of conscience. The guarantor in both cases was the monarchy, whose authority was thereby strengthened. The edict seemed to have created a permanently biconfessional kingdom, but not many at the time would have entertained that idea. Catholics certainly looked to the religious unification of the country, even if they disagreed over whether that goal should be achieved by peaceful means or by force. The Reformed Church, reluctantly, had to give up its hope of winning France to its faith. Instead, Huguenots turned to insisting on their position as a protected minority under the edict, which, they claimed, was permanent and irrevocable. As many commentators have remarked, the edict did not propose that biconfessionality would be a permanent situation. The preamble declares that the law would be in force until such time as God saw fit to reunite both confessions in one faith. Just how that was to be accomplished was not clear; Henri IV may have continued to hope for a resolution of religious difference in a reformed Gallican church. He largely dealt evenhandedly with the religious groups.34 After his conversion he cemented his ties to the Catholic Church by displays of piety, support for the Catholic clergy, personal ties with aristocratic Catholic leaders, and insistence on the Edict of Nantes’s rules on re-establishing Catholicism everywhere. But his commissioners negotiated or imposed local religious settlements that often satisfied Huguenot rather than Catholic wishes, and he renewed permission for Huguenots to maintain military garrisons in security towns beyond what the edict had allowed. Louis XIII destroyed Huguenot military power during the Rohan wars of the 1620s, but he renewed the edict’s other provisions in the Peace of Alais in 1629. Faced with the Fronde in the middle decades of the century and in need of good relations with Protestant England, Mazarin softened the monarchy’s treatment of the minority. But once Louis XIV took personal control of the government in the 1660s, he started to undermine the guarantees the edict provided. In the 1680s he sent troops into areas with large Huguenot populations to force conversions (the infamous dragonnades), and in 1685, he revoked the Edict of Nantes. Yet his policy for unifying the kingdom in one confession would also fail.
34
Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 3, 15–16.
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While the French state remained committed to a policy of enforcing peace edicts, confessional coexistence had a powerful force behind it. In the wake of 16th-century peace settlements, and then again after the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, the government sent commissioners into religiously mixed areas to mediate or arbitrate the numerous conflicts that arose in trying to enforce the laws. We should not exaggerate their effectiveness; the task was enormous and their resources limited. But studies of their work have shown that they had an impact in reducing tensions and arranging local settlements.35 They had to satisfy Catholics who wanted strict enforcement of the law’s stipulation that Catholic worship be restored everywhere and Reformed worship be limited to certain localities. But they also had to address Huguenot complaints about transgressions of their rights. To a large degree, success resulted from the recognition that the commissioners’ efforts reflected the king’s will. The agreements they arranged in communities often proclaimed the inhabitants’ willingness to live together because it was the king’s desire that they should do so. And the commissioners exacted solemn oaths from the local leaders of both sides to respect the king’s wishes. But local coexistence did not simply follow upon royal orders. Indeed, the local success of peace settlements had depended on the willingness of neighbors in the rival faiths to avoid bloodshed and live together, even in the midst of the worst violence of the religious wars. They may not have been aware of Erasmus’s thoughts on Christian charity or those of Michel de l’Hospital on co-citizenship, but they frequently practiced exactly those ideas in daily life, mixing in the political, economic, and social activities of their communities. When they negotiated peaceful coexistence, they used the language of friendship 35 Penny Roberts, “Religious Pluralism in Practice: The Enforcement of the Edicts of Pacification” in Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass, and Penny Roberts (eds.), The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France: Papers from the Exeter Conference, April 1999 (Bern: 2000), 31–43; Jérémie Foa, “Making Peace: The Commissions for Enforcing the Pacification Edicts in the Reign of Charles IX (1560–1574),” French History 18 (2004), 256–274; Elisabeth Rabut, Le roi, l’église et le temple: l’exécution de l’Édit de Nantes en Dauphiné (Grenoble: 1987), passim; Daniel Hickey, “Enforcing the Edict of Nantes: The 1599 Commissions and Local Elites in Dauphiné and PoitouAunis” in Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass, and Penny Roberts (eds.), The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France: Papers from the Exeter Conference, April 1999 (Bern: 2000), 65–83; Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 16–22.
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and brotherhood. In the 1560s, the inhabitants of two Dauphiné communities, Nyons and Saint-Laurent-des-Arbres, took oaths to “live in peace, friendship, and confederation.”36 If conflict prevented such amicable feelings, they were still capable of reaching accommodations through negotiations, which maintained peace in their communities. Historians have made a distinction between these two forms of local coexistence, though certainly one flowed into the other.37 The daily willingness to live, work, and socialize together—what we might call “practical coexistence”—seems likely to have been widespread.38 But it is often the least likely to have been recorded in documents that allow us to examine it closely. It is apparent, for example, in mixed marriages, which were common in many, though not all, biconfessional communities. In Loudun (Poitou), between 1598 and 1601, at least of a third of marriages recorded in the Protestant consistory records were mixed. It seems likely, however, that the numbers of such matches declined in later years as tensions increased between the groups and Huguenots lost political power in the city.39 In the town of Melle (Poitou), mixed marriages were numerous, even during the 1660s and 1670s, when royal legislation tried to prevent it. The frequency with which Catholics and Protestants were willing to ignore the confessional divide to
36
Benedict, “Un roi, une loi, deux fois,” 294. For somewhat different descriptions of the varieties or stages of coexistence, see Yves Krumenacker, “La coexistence confessionelle aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Quelque problèmes de méthode” in Didier Boisson and Yves Krumenacker (eds.), La coexistence confessionelle à l’épreuve: Études sur les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans la France moderne, (Chrétiens et Sociétés, Documents et Mémoires) 9 (Lyon: 2009), 107–125; Richard Bonney, “The Obstacles to Pluralism in Early Modern Europe” in Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass, and Penny Roberts (eds.), The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France: Papers from the Exeter Conference, April 1999 (Bern: 2000), 209–229; Mark Greengrass, “Afterword: Living Religious Diversity” in C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist, and Mark Greengrass (eds.), Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe (Farnham, Surrey: 2009), 281–295; Benedict, “Un roi, une loi, deux fois” and Luria, Sacred Boundaries. 38 Or what Bob Scribner called the “tolerance of practical rationality.” See Bob Scribner, “Preconditions of Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth-Century Germany” in Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, UK: 1996), 32–47. 39 On the early period see, Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 158–159. On the later, see Edwin Bezzina, “La-mort, l’au-delà et les relations confessionelles: Les testaments et leurs testateurs dans la ville de Loudun, 1598–1685” in Didier Boisson and Yves Krumenacker (eds.), La coexistence confessionelle à l’épreuve: Études sur les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans la France moderne (Chrétiens et Sociétés, Documents et Mémoires) 9 (Lyon: 2009), 151–168. 37
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make marriage alliances suggests that the town’s confessional boundary was porous.40 Intermarriage did not necessarily create peaceful relations; in some cases, matches made for reasons of familial advancement might simply have imported confessional conflict into domestic space. But more often they indicated a willingness of families to cross the religious boundary, or to ignore it, in the pursuit of desireable matches. Where it occurred, intermarriage created religiously mixed kinship networks, in which people of different faiths cooperated and participated in each other’s family religious rituals—baptisms, marriages, and funerals. At baptisms, godparents of one faith might present children of the other.41 Practical coexistence extended across a wide range of other daily activities, though we often have to infer it from the complaints of those who were opposed to such interactions. In the Poitou town of Niort, for example, the Reformed minister complained to the provincial synod in 1601 that his congregants had attended the inaugural banquet of the city’s new mayor, and some had even danced there with Catholics. Consistory records from throughout the country contain similar complaints. In the Languedoc community of Ganges, the Reformed consistory heard complaints about congregants dancing on Catholic saints’ festivals. In Nîmes, prominent Huguenots suffered censure for dancing on such occasions, despite the riposte of one who insisted, “there was no harm in dancing.” The problem for the consistories was not just dancing, though that was sinful enough to provoke their ire, but that it was often associated with Catholic religious observances. Indeed, Huguenot participation in a range of Catholic practices was a constant source of concern to ministers and elders. Their co-religionists continued to bring their children to churches for Catholic baptisms, seen as carrying a greater ritualistic power than the Reformed version. They used elements of Catholic funeral rites in their own burials. They consulted soothsayers, arranged for masses to be said, and made the sign of the cross.42 40
Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 159–162. For a discussion of mixed marriages, see Luria Sacred Boundaries, 143–192; Benedict, “Un roi, une loi, deux fois,” 304–305; Hanlon, Confession and Community, 102–111. 42 Robert Sauzet, Contre-réforme et réforme catholique en bas-Languedoc: Le diocèse de Nîmes au XVIIe siècle (Louvain: 1979), 173–178. On funerals see also, Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 103–142. 41
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Daily practical coexistence is apparent in other sorts of interactions as well. In Paris, Huguenots made use of Catholic notaries in credit transactions rather than relying just on their co-religionists.43 In Saumur, home to a Reformed Academy and an Oratorian school set up to compete with it, the teachers of both institutions frequented each other and maintained polite relations. Huguenot students sometimes took courses at the Catholic school, and Catholic fathers sometimes sent their sons to the Reformed one.44 In Huguenot-dominated Nîmes too, intellectual life often crossed the confessional boundary. Samuel Petit, professor of theology and Hebrew in the city’s Reformed Academy, counted Peiresc, Gassendi, and Mersenne among his friends. And the Jesuit instructors imposed on the college in 1634 had occasion in their annual reports to remark on their cordial relations with their Huguenot colleagues, though, to be sure, that did not prevent them from preaching polemical sermons and from trying to convert Reformed students.45 In Brittany, the Benedictines of Vitré preserved friendships with Huguenots they had known since childhood. Breton nobles of different faiths protected each other and met for courteous discussions of theology.46 Castres, in Languedoc, was home to the mixed chamber associated with the Parlement of Toulouse. As such it had a biconfessional population of families associated with the court. Examination of the chamber’s records shows that the judges rarely split along confessional lines in their decisions, except in cases dealing with the most sensitive issues of religious coexistence, such as Huguenots working on Catholic festivals or provocative sermons by militant preachers. Otherwise, the judges partook of an outlook born of a shared professional training.
43 Christian Aubrée, “Les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans le marché du crédit parisien au XVIIe siècle” in Didier Boisson and Yves Krumenacker (eds.), La coexistence confessionelle à l’épreuve: Études sur les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans la France moderne (Chrétiens et Sociétés, Documents et Mémoires) 9 (Lyon: 2009), 127–149. However, Aubrée points out that they preferred fellow Huguenot notaries for recording their private family documents. 44 François Lebrun, “Saumur au XVIIe siècle: Les limites d’une cohabitation confessionelle” in Guy Saupin, Rémi Fabre and Michel Launay (eds.), La Tolérance: Colloque international de Nantes (mai 1998) (Rennes: 1999), 41–47. 45 Robert Sauzet, “Les difficultés de la tolérance dans une région sensible, le pays nîmois” in Guy Saupin, Rémi Fabre, and Michel Launay (eds.), La Tolérance: Colloque international de Nantes (mai 1998) (Rennes: 1999), 49–54, see 52; idem, Nîmes, 270–271. 46 Carluer, “Bretagne,” 38–39.
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Outside the courtroom they mixed as friends and attended the same learned academy, which provided a forum for toleration and furthered a common culture.47 The cooperation among the local elite and the prosperity that the court’s presence brought to Castres helped maintain peace in the community for decades until the crown imposed Catholic consuls on the town’s government and obliged the Reformed school to accept Jesuit instructors. Only then did the confessional equilibrium come under strain. But harmony in Castres was not simply the result of practical daily coexistence between Huguenots and Catholics. It was also carefully negotiated and thus provides an apt example of the second form of local coexistence based not simply on the willingness of both groups to get along but on carefully constructed agreements that recognized the possibility for both groups to live and worship in communities. Such agreements did not blur the confessional boundary. Indeed they clarified it by carefully delineating the rights of and limits on each group and apportioning civic space between them. The key was to reach accommodation on the main flashpoints that could provoke conflict— temple locations, cemetery use, the timing and location of religious observances, work on Catholic festivals, access to civic institutions of poor relief and education, and the composition of town councils. In 1598, prior to the Edict of Nantes, leaders of the Reformed and Catholic communities of Castres and surrounding towns swore to an act of union to keep the peace. They renewed the oath each time conflict threatened: in 1615 during Condé’s revolt and during religious warfare in 1620, 1621, and 1627.48 Such agreements had numerous precedents. Just before the outbreak of the second religious war in 1567, the two groups signed pacts in Vienne, Montélimar, Orange, Caen, and Annonay.49 In the Limousin town of Beaulieu, Huguenots and Catholics agreed to a “concordat” in 1575 that regulated public life
47 Stéphan Capot, “La paix vécue à Castres au temps de l’Édit de Nantes (1595– 1670)” in Paul Mironneau and Isabelle Pébay-Clottes (eds.), Paix des armes, paix des âmes: Actes du colloque international tenu au Musée national du château du Pau et à l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour les, 8, 9, 10 et 11 octobre 1998 (Paris: 2000), 303–312; Capot, Justice et religion en Languedoc, 107; Raymond A. Mentzer, “The Edict of Nantes and its Institutions” in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (eds.), Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge, UK: 2002), 98–116, see 108–115. 48 Souriac, “Places de surêté,” 66–67. 49 Christin, La paix de religion, 122–128.
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in the town, including elections to the council. The minority Catholics were assured representation. In Argentat (also in Limousin), the local seigneur, Charlotte of Nassau, arranged a similar settlement that guaranteed both groups access to positions on the three-member syndicat, which governed the town.50 Such settlements helped these places avoid the conflicts over cemeteries and temples that plagued other Limousin towns, such as Rochechouart, Treignac, and Aubusson. These agreements display a very matter-of-fact concern to keep confessional violence outside towns and minimize the possibility for conflict inside them. But they also had deeper roots. In Limoges, for example, confessional tensions were sharp in the early 1560s. Protestants, who were a small minority, committed acts of iconoclasm, and Catholics countered with menacing processions. The night guard had to be maintained constantly to prevent worse outbreaks of violence. But hostility ebbed after 1564 when Limoges’s leadership made a clear decision to avoid internal conflict by invoking the city’s historical struggle for autonomy from superior authorities as a way to promote it rather than religion as the primary sense of identity. This strategy worked for decades as each side avoided its most conflict-provoking activities: Huguenots refrained from iconoclastic attacks, and Catholics did not engage militant preachers. “Municipalism,” as Michel Cassan has called it, created a civic solidarity that could overcome confessional division and marginalize militant Catholics in the city, who organized themselves into associations, such as the Confraternity of the Holy Cross, to harass Huguenots. That some of the city’s consular families were confessionally mixed no doubt facilitated peacekeeping. And Huguenots could on some occasions accede to consular office. One notable result of these efforts was that Limoges suffered no violence in the wake of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris. Confessional tensions did not disappear from Limoges; rather they were managed and contained by cooperation among the city’s elite. Unfortunately, the city’s efforts at evenhandedness did not survive into the 17th century. Huguenots complained to commissioners sent into the provinces in 1611, the year after Henri IV’s assassination, that Catholics had been throwing stones at them and their minister had been attacked. They were being excluded from the city’s hospital,
50 Michel Cassan, Le temps des guerres de religion: Le cas du Limousin (vers 1530– vers 1630) (Paris: 1996), 343–344.
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and their poor were being denied municipal aid unless they converted. Such complaints must be assessed carefully; petitioners might well have exaggerated the situation as part of a rhetorical strategy to gain advantage in ongoing negotiations between confessions.51 But in Limoges tensions do seem to have been on the rise, and the commissioners decided in the Huguenots’ favor. Cassan suggests that the changed atmosphere resulted from a growing militant, Catholic piety, evident in the multiplication of penitent confraternities and the arrival of the Jesuits.52 Other cities also experienced either ongoing or renewed confessional conflict. In the former Holy League stronghold of Poitiers (Poitou), for example, the Huguenot minority felt under frequent attack. They complained that Catholics had forced them to build their temple far from town and then assaulted them while they were in transit to the construction site. In one particularly tense incident in 1606, Poitier’s Reformed community met at the temple to celebrate a fast day and rumors started to spread among Catholics that Huguenots were planning to take over the city. The mayor called out the militia, which increased the sense of panic. Eventually magistrates were able to gain control of the situation and calm matters before violence erupted. In the aftermath of Henri IV’s assassination in 1610, tensions once again ran high. At the end of June, Catholics raised barricades in the streets, and Huguenots hid indoors. Two years later, Huguenots complained that their cemetery had been attacked, and that students of the Jesuit school broke doors and windows in the minister’s house. During the period of religious warfare in 1622, the students attacked the cemetery once again. Apparently, confessional tension was a constant factor in the life of this provincial capital, and violence easily surfaced in particularly difficult times.53 In nearby Parthenay relations between the groups also seemed particularly strained, and at certain moments the inhabitants barely escaped armed conflict, such as on Christmas Eve 1618. Catholics complained that while they were at their vigil, Huguenots armed themselves and gathered in secret locations around the city. The Huguenots claimed self-defense; rumors had spread that the Catholics were planning to
51 52 53
Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 45. Cassan, Temps des guerres, 228, 237–239, 245–247, 346–348. Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 21–22, 28.
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massacre them. Bloodshed was only narrowly avoided. But the history of confessional relations in this town suggests that the break between the groups was not absolute and that, given the right circumstances and the efforts of outside authorities, Parthenay’s Catholics and Huguenots could arrive at agreements on difficult issues. They had done so in 1600, when, with the mediation of the royal lieutenantgeneral of Poiters, the two sides drew up a contract that established a location outside the town for the Reformed temple. The contract’s language suggests a high level of tension in the town but also a willingness to reach accommodation. The Huguenots insisted they had a right to worship in the town but because doing so “engender[ed] divisions and enmity,” they had agreed to move outside. Catholics objected that Huguenots had no legal right to worship either in the town or at the place they had chosen outside it. But Catholics realized that their stance had provoked a “great altercation between the parties such that each side was close to taking up arms to preserve its rights.” So, “to avoid tumult and sedition and to nourish peace between the inhabitants, who for the past 30 years have unanimously maintained themselves in the king’s service,” they would now consent to public Reformed worship, providing it was located at a place further from the town. The Huguenots, seeking to remain in friendship with their Catholic neighbors, agreed.54 The contract and the report on the 1618 incident suggest that in Parthenay the potential for violence was real, but so too was the desire of the two groups to find some way of preventing it through compromise. Cemeteries were often at the center of serious disputes. Catholics were angered by the burial of those they deemed heretics in sacred ground. During the religious wars and even after, the remains of Huguenots buried in Catholic cemeteries could suffer disinterment and desecration. Huguenots rejected the very idea of sacred ground. And they sometimes targeted Catholic cemeteries for attack. Yet as members of biconfessional communities, they did not want to be excluded from an important civic institution, the burial ground. And so they insisted on sharing it with their Catholic neighbors. The Edict of Nantes called for the establishment of separate Catholic and Reformed cemeteries, but such a resolution was not always possible in cash-strapped communities. And so the negotiation of a compromise
54
Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 23–24.
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ensued.55 In 1609 in Castelmoron (Agenais), the inhabitants came to an agreement to continue sharing the cemetery. In the contract, the Huguenots stated, “that since the beginning of the [religious] troubles in France, . . . the inhabitants . . . have comported themselves so agreeably toward each other under the . . . king’s edicts that they have had neither debates nor contention among them over the burial of the dead of one or the other religion . . . [The] inhabitants of each religion have buried their dead in the parish cemetery . . . without anyone objecting.” The Catholics declared that, “they will agree that those of the said [Reformed] religion will continue to use, just as they will, the parish cemetery.”56 Such mixing in cemeteries was not always acceptable, but the religious groups could still arrive at settlements, often with the help of royal commissioners. Sometimes the arrangements involved giving Protestants a part of the cemetery, as was the case in Marans (Aunis) in 1599. Often the Protestants received the portion of the burial ground furthest from the parish church, in that way soothing Catholic fears of desecrating sacred grounds. In Fresne (Normandy) in 1612, royal commissioners gave Huguenots the right to bury their dead at the end of the cemetery, and ordered them to separate that share from the part Catholics would continue to use.57 Local Catholics and Protestants were the parties to such agreements, but as is evident in many of these cases, often a third party, an authority from outside the community, played a crucial role. Provincial officials, magistrates, and royal commissioners could take the lead in negotiating agreements, or they could exert pressure on a biconfessional town’s inhabitants, all the while being aware of what the inhabitants of rival confessions would agree to and relying on their sense of the local balance of power. The resolution of conflicts in two Poitevin towns—Saint-Maixent and Niort—can provide useful examples.58 The population of Saint-Maixent early in the century was split roughly in half between Catholics and Huguenots. The Edict of Nantes made it a Huguenot security town with a governor from the
55
Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 103–142. “Usage en commun d’un cimetière entre catholiques et protestants en 1609,” Bulletin de la société d’histoire du protestantisme français 2 (1853): 502–505. See also Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 113–114. 57 Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 116. 58 I draw here on a more detailed discussion in Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 32–46. 56
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Reformed Church, but its mayor, town councilors, and militia captains were Catholics. Little evidence exists of any conflict over this arrangement in the period before Henri IV’s assassination. But after his death, tensions quickly appeared. In 1610, the former king’s advisor, Sully, reached a deal with Catholics in the city that allowed the entry of two Huguenots onto the city council, with the proviso that in the future councilors would be chosen without regard to religion. The arrangement did not assuage tensions. In 1612, Huguenots complained to royal commissioners that they wanted to open their shops on Catholic festivals (which the Edict of Nantes expressly prohibited) and that Catholics were preventing them from eating meat in hostelries on Fridays. Furthermore, they insisted that, as a security town, Saint-Maixent should have a Reformed mayor. Catholics complained about Huguenots opening their shops on festivals and eating meat on forbidden days. They also claimed that Huguenots had not built a wall to separate their cemetery clearly from the Catholic one, even though they had been ordered to do so. More ominously, Catholics accused their rivals of taking up arms and plotting to seize the town’s hotel de ville. The rhetoric was heated, but one gets the sense that while the tensions were real, both sides were also using their claims to influence the commissioners, who, in turn, stuck close to the Edict of Nantes in rendering their decision. Huguenots were not to be molested for eating meat in their homes and inns, but they could not open shops on Catholic festivals. They did make concessions to the Huguenots’ political demands. Henceforth, they would get two permanent seats on the council. But Catholics would retain the majority, a decision that maintained their authority in this otherwise Huguenot-dominated town. In Niort, a third of the population followed the Reformed Church, but the city had Huguenot mayors and royal governors. As we have seen, there is evidence from the early years of the century of easy mixing between the two groups. But here too the rise of tensions in the city mirrored that in the kingdom in the 1610s and 1620s. In 1618, a conflict erupted over Catholic processions. Catholics complained that Huguenots had blocked a procession, and Huguenots retorted that Catholics had tried to inflame passions by directing the procession by the temple. The two sides reached a pragmatic compromise in which the times of processions were regulated so that they did not pass by the temple while Huguenots were worshipping. But during the renewed religious wars of the 1620s, the situation deteriorated. In 1622, both groups took advantage of Louis XIII’s stay in the city
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to present complaints and re-negotiate their relations. Catholics complained about Huguenot obstruction of the free exercise of their religion. Once again, processions were an issue, but added to that was the charge that Huguenots were harassing the newly arrived Jesuits and Capuchins whose presence in Niort exacerbated confessional conflict. Catholics also insisted that Huguenots refused to decorate the facades of their homes on Catholic festivals and resisted the placing of a crucifix in Niort’s courtroom. Huguenots countered that they were being prevented from opening a school that they claimed the Edict of Nantes allowed them. They also protested that their poor were denied entrance into the city’s hospital. The most threatening accusation, however, was the Catholic charge that Huguenots were colluding with rebel co-religionists outside the city. That the king spent time in Niort, while campaigning against the rebels in the province, did not bode well for the minority’s claims. And indeed, Catholics did gain much from the decisions of the king and his commissioners. From now on, Niort would have Catholic mayors, and Catholic preachers would operate freely in the city. But as in SaintMaixent, the judgments largely followed what the Edict of Nantes said. Huguenots could open their school, as long as its teachers did not “dogmatize,” and their poor would have access to the hospital. They would not have to decorate their homes on Catholic festivals, but, just as the Edict stipulated, they would have to allow civic authorities to do so. Most importantly, the king rejected the accusation that Niort’s Huguenots were colluding with the rebels. The king’s adjudication favored the Catholics, hardly a surprising outcome given the situation. But he continued to protect Huguenots as long as they were loyal. In Saint-Maixent and Niort, as elsewhere in the kingdom, the rival confessional groups managed to keep peace by reaching accommodations, which government authorities encouraged and mediated. Peaceful coexistence depended on this local willingness to negotiate coupled with the monarchy’s backing. What changed in France and what undermined coexistence was the disappearance of this royal support for accommodation. Peaceful daily interactions and compromises between the confessional groups did not cease, but the government’s policy turned from conciliation to persecution. Once that happened, earlier agreements might be ignored or overturned. In biconfessional communities this change was most evident in the re-arrangement of
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communal and sacred space.59 Step by step, Protestants lost their claim to a presence in the communities they shared with Catholics. Their cemeteries were pushed outside towns or shut down. Their temples suffered the same fate. The outcome of changing cemetery arrangements in the Poitevin community of Latillé is representative of what happened in many biconfessional communities. Early in the 17th century, commissioners arranged a settlement by which Catholics and Huguenots shared the parish cemetery. In 1619, a lawsuit led to the separation of burial grounds, but the new Huguenot burial ground was still in the town. Three decades later, a new suit shut down this cemetery and forced the local Reformed Church to find another outside the town. In Loudun, the groups shared the parish cemetery of Saint-Pierre-du-Marché, though in 1611 commissioners ordered the city to construct a wall between the Catholic and Reformed parts. In 1633, Richelieu’s agent in Loudun, ordered the Huguenot burial ground out of the city.60 Throughout western France, the decade of the 1630s brought an end to cemetery sharing in many communities. In 1634 and 1635, a royal court ordered cemeteries to be separated in some 69 communities in Poitou along with others in nearby provinces.61 Lawsuits in later years would force Huguenots to move their cemeteries outside towns, thus diminishing their claim to co-citizenship with their Catholic neighbors. By the 1680s, Huguenots were losing their rights even to their separate burial grounds. Royal intendants insisted so many had converted to Catholicism (a claim the Huguenots disputed) that those remaining no longer needed much in the way of cemeteries. By the second half of the century, the Edict of Nantes, which Huguenots had successfully used to defend their position in communities, was now increasingly being turned against them, as was evident in the more restrictive way courts decided disputes over temples. Plaintiffs
59 On the 16th-century arrangements of space, see Jérémie Foa, “An Unequal Apportionment: The Conflict over Space between Protestants and Catholics at the Beginning of the Wars of Religion,” French History 20 (2006): 369–386; Penny Roberts, “The Most Crucial Battle of the Wars of Religion? The Conflict over Sites for Reformed Worship in Sixteenth-Century France,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 89 (1988): 247–267. 60 Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 132–133. 61 Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 135.
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had increasing success in bringing lawsuits that challenged Huguenot rights to some temples, because Reformed consistories could not produce documents proving they had worshipped in them in 1597, as the edict required. Others were condemned because, they were constructed on properties ecclesiastics possessed or because they were located in former church buildings. Huguenots also lost the right to worship on noble domains when courts decided that Reformed seigneurs, who had sponsored temples, did not have the privilege of high justice and thus could no longer do so.62 Lawsuits against Reformed worship also employed new strategies. One was to claim that temples near Catholic churches, chapels, or religious houses disturbed Catholics at the mass. The accusations cited Article Three of the Edict of Nantes which ordered that Catholicism could be “peaceably and freely exercised” everywhere without “any trouble or impediment.” No one could “trouble, molest, or disquiet” priests in their “celebration of the divine service.”63 Previously this article had provided the legal means for re-establishing Catholic worship in places it had ceased and for returning the Church’s property to the Catholic clergy. But it became a potent weapon against temples in the sacred space of biconfessional communities, when priests claimed that the sound of nearby Reformed worship disturbed their religious observances. Another legal strategy depended on a royal council decision of 1682 ordering the destruction of temples, which received back Huguenots who had converted to Catholicism. Catholics seeking to close down Reformed worship found means to infiltrate converts back into temples, where they were “discovered,” bringing an end to Reformed worship in biconfessional communities. In Niort both strategies were used. In 1683, the royal intendant Lamoignon de Basville ordered the temple closed, because it was too close to a Catholic almshouse in which the mass was celebrated. The local Huguenots dragged their heels in complying, and on 19 April 1684, a Catholic crowd invaded the temple, sacked it, and made more than enough noise to “prove” that the mass in the nearby almshouse could be disturbed. Even this assault did not immediately have the
62 Keith P. Luria, “Sharing Sacred Space: Protestant Temples and Religious Coexistence in the Seventeenth Century” in Kathleen Perry Long (ed.), Religious Differences in France: Past and Present (Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies) 74 (Kirksville, MO: 2006), 51–72. 63 Mousnier, Assassination of Henri IV, 319.
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desired effect, and 11 days later the Catholic mayor produced a young convert, whom he claimed had returned to Reformed worship. The Niort temple did not survive this last ploy. Throughout France temples succumbed to such attacks. By 1680, France had only half the number of temples that had existed in 1598. The 1682 order multiplied the closures. In the last seven months of 1681, only one temple in the country suffered condemnation. In 1682, the tally increased to 48, with a similar number the following year. In 1684, the total jumped to 65.64 Changing royal policies, the rising tide of Catholic-Reformation militancy, the influence of religious orders, such as the Jesuits and Capuchins, the draining away of the Reformed population through conversions—all these contributed to disabling peaceful confessional relations that careful negotiations or simple practical coexistence had created in biconfessional French communities. But the Niort example illustrates another development. It was not royal officials or Catholic ecclesiastics who found a way to shut the temple for good. It was the Catholic mayor. The situation had changed in this town, where decades before Catholics and Huguenots had mixed easily and the leadership of the two groups had negotiated over sensitive issues. Confessional coexistence appeared to be dead. But was this necessarily the case? What the evidence suggests is not that all the daily local relations between Catholics and Huguenots were poisoned. Instead, the problem was that when the two confessional groups came into conflict, there was no longer anyway to negotiate a peaceful result. The monarchy, its officials, and its courts no longer mediated or arbitrated; they persecuted. France’s Huguenot’s were losing the status of co-citizens and their recognition as loyal subjects of the king. In 1685 Louis XIV, in a convenient political fiction, claimed that there were few Huguenots left in his kingdom and therefore the Edict of Nantes was unnecessary. He revoked it. What ensued is beyond the scope of this essay. But the revocation did not mean the end of the Reformed religion or biconfessionalism in France. Many Huguenots converted but thereafter frequently shunned Catholic ceremonies and continued Reformed worship clandestinely. Many others fled the kingdom. In both cases, Catholics often aided and abetted their Reformed neighbors, which suggests that not all
64 Solange Deyon, Du loyalisme au refus: Les protestants français et leur députégénéral entre la Fronde et la Révocation (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: 1976), 150–51.
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the king’s co-religionists shared his bigotry.65 Huguenot revolt in the southern Cevennes region led to a bloody repression, and royal agents throughout the country pursued secret Reformed worship. But it survived and by the late-18th century the French Reformed Church had reconstituted itself, though true toleration of its faith did not arrive until the Revolution. Despite royal persecution, France had become a permanently biconfessional country.
65 See, for example, the experiences of the Poitevin Huguenot Jean Migault recounted in his memoir, Les dragonnades en Poitou et Saintonge: Le Journal de Jean Migault (Le Poiré-sur-Vie: 1988); see also Yves Krumenacker, “Les dragonnades du Poitou: Leur écho dans les mémoires,” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 31 (1985): 405–422.
PEACE COMMISSIONERS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE WARS OF RELIGION: TOWARD AN INTERACTIONIST INTERPRETATION OF THE PACIFICATION PROCESS IN FRANCE Jérémie Foa Two opposing models for the diffusion of social phenomena are usually proposed: researchers have often to choose either bottom-up or top-down explanations in dealing with issues like “reformation”, “confessionalization”, or, in this case study, “pacification.” When it comes to the return of a state of calm during the French Wars of Religion, the top-down model for pacification has long been the favored one. Historians have rightly stressed the role played by Catherine de Medici, Henry IV, the pacification edicts, and the edicts’ commissioners. According to Arlette Jouanna, coexistence was “imposed from the top by royal edicts, maintained by governors and controlled by specially nominated commissioners”.1 There is no denying that, while enjoining his subjects to “live together as brothers, friends and fellow-citizens”, King Charles IX (1560–1574) recommended a solution to the violence that only the Crown seemed able to administer. In promulgating a series of edicts granting freedom of worship and conscience to the Huguenots2 and sending out commissioners for the enforcement of the edicts of pacification, two by two through the kingdom, the king encountered the opposition of most of his subjects.3 But this interpretation could be criticized for ignoring the subjects’ role in the pacification process and for turning them into eternal children, constantly brawling and incapable of restoring calm on their own. Did the state
1 Arlette Jouanna, “Coexister dans la différence: expérience de l’union avant Coutras” in J. Pau, and D. Pau (eds.), L’avènement d’Henri IV. Quatrième centenaire de la bataille de Coutras (Pau: 1988), 149–166, cit. 151. 2 Edict of January 1562, Amboise March 1563, Peace of Longjumeau March 1568, Edict of Saint-Germain August 1570, and Boulogne July 1573. The best edited edition, published under the aegis of Bernard Barbiche, is to be found on-line: http://elec.enc. sorbonne.fr/editsdepacification/. 3 On this matter, see: Jérémie Foa, “Making peace: The commissions for enforcing the pacification edicts in the reign of Charles IX (1560–1574)”, French History 18 (2004): 256–74.
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truly have the means to impose peace instead of reacting to daily problems, and did it truly hope to succeed in achieving peace without considering local interests?4 As early as 1563, an opinion offered by a Huguenot from Tours is quite revealing about how the King’s subjects have been infantilized, when confronted with religious coexistence: It is true that during the time that the commissioners were present, they [the Catholics] saw the commissioners, they [the Catholics] acted like small school children, who behave while the master is present and are all in a fury when he is gone. Those about whom I speak have done this, but with a rage far more lethal than that of children: for they have killed, murdered, vandalized, and looted most of the good houses of the city.5
Were the Crown and its agents, in particular the peace commissioners, really the school masters of pacification? Were the inhabitants truly incapable of maintaining peace without them, or without constraint? Were the subjects really deaf to the pacification process? This article does not aim to deny the state and its agents’ key role in peace-keeping but tries to offer a more nuanced vision of the respective roles of all the actors by using an interactionist interpretation of the pacification mechanisms.6 Friendship Pacts and Avoided Saint Bartholomews: Local Forms of Self-pacification? Inventing Peace on a Local Level Although rare, archives do exist to study pacified relationships between the two confessions at a local level, especially during the reign of Charles IX. Among those discordant pieces, the curious and apparently spontaneous agreements made between Huguenots and Catholics during major periods of violence are especially interesting. In these written documents, on the eve of war, believers of the two religions
4 Jean-Frédéric Schaub, “Le Temps et l’Etat: vers un nouveau régime historiographique de l’Ancien Régime français”, Quaderni fiorentini per la storia del pensiero giuridico moderno 25 (1996): 127–181. 5 Remonstrance faite au Roy estans au Plessis les Tours, par le deputté de la Religion reformee de ladite ville, et telle que de vive voix elle à (sic) été prononcée et recueillie le 25. de Novembre 1565, s. l., s. n., 1566 (Bibliothèque Nationale, RES LB 33–468), B 2 vo. 6 Heinrich Richard Schmidt, “Emden est partout. Vers un modèle interactif de la confessionalisation”, Francia. Froschüngen zur westeuropaïschen Geschichte. Frühe Neuzeit, revolution, Empire 26 (1999): 23–45.
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agreed to avoid violence and always to behave as “brothers, friends and fellow-citizens”, even though elsewhere passions were exploding. These agreements are filled with the vocabulary of friendship, in such a surprising way that few historians have studied them. Olivier Christin, who published and studied the first examples, christened them “friendship pacts”.7 Today, two dozen of them have been found for the time of Charles IX, something that distinguishes this reign from all those that came before or after it. In a number of cities in the kingdom, as the sound of war came closer, inhabitants from both confessions promised one another, in writing, to live peacefully and to behave like “brothers, friends and fellowcitizens” (see table 3). In Châlon-sur-Saône, for example, on May 18, 1562, as the first civil war was beginning, the inhabitants decided to live together “peacefully and in accordance with the king’s edicts”.8 In Nant, in the province of Rouergue, in August 1568, the bourgeois “from one and the other confession . . . have said and affirmed that they want to live in good and perfect peace”.9 A few days after the Saint Bartholomew massacres, the inhabitants of Millau declared that they “will live in peace”, “loving, cherishing, and continuing to see and frequent one another”.10 In Saint-Affrique, the pact proclaimed “peace, concord, love and friendship”.11 The same was true in Caen and Annonay.12 Physical and symbolic violence were thus excluded. In this way, words of peace founded a peace of words.
7 Olivier Christin, La paix de religion. L’autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle, 122–132; idem, “Pactes d’amitié et républicanisme urbain: quelques villes françaises devant la biconfessionalité” in Heinz Duchhardt and Patrice Veit (eds.), Krieg und Freiden im übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit, Theorie—Praxis—Bilder, Guerre et Paix du Moyen Age aux Temps Modernes, Théories, pratiques, représentations (Mainz: 2000), 157–166; idem, “ ‘Peace Must Come from Us’: Friendship Pacts between the Confessions during the Wars of Religion” in Ruth Whelan and Carol Baxter (eds.), The Edict of Nantes and its implications in France, Britain and Ireland (Dublin: 2003), 92–103. 8 Claude Perry, Histoire ecclesiastique et civile ancienne et moderne de la ville et cité de Chalons sur Saone (Chalon sur Saône: 1659), 327. 9 Elie Mazel, Les Guerres de religion à Nant et le pays d’extrême Haute-Marche du Rouergue (Rodez: 1920), 39 sq. 10 Archives Municipales [hereafter AM] Millau, CC 42, 2e inventaire. 11 Olivier Christin, “Amis, frères et concitoyens. Ceux qui refusèrent la SaintBarthélemy (1572)”, Cahiers de la Villa Gillet, 11 (2000): 71–94. 12 Olivier Christin, L’autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle (Paris: 1998), 311–318.
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Nevertheless, friendship pacts are not theoretic discourses but performative speeches, which aimed not only to say the peace but to enforce it. They thus described the duties of the “friends,” those who were deemed capable of peace. The others were excluded; they were declared in advance incapable of peace and, as strangers or vagrants, potential traitors. Outside of the pact, the enemies were soldiers and looters, regardless of confession. Pacts were a strictly political alliance in the face of war; they enacted at the local level the patriotic solution recommended by theoreticians and poets. Local peace was not guaranteed, however. In fact, those pacts where the inhabitants took one another for “brothers and friends” paradoxically bear witness to a breach of communal trust and cohesion. What confidence could be placed in someone of the other faith? What ritual could be used to cement the union? In a word, how to force the other to keep his word when trust was missing and pressures for war mounting? In refusing to place responsibility for peace strictly on the good will of the people, and instead imposing an external and inflexible constraint, the inhabitants were trying to protect themselves against betrayal. As such, these pacts were expressions of distrust. In an ancien régime society, the divinity traditionally constituted a superior principle, guaranteeing the irreversibility of an oath. But an appeal to a supra-human intermediary that assured union posed problems in this case. After the confessional schism, people no longer imagined their relationship to the sacred or its intervention in the same way. That is why, with the exception of Saint-Affrique, pacts did not mention any sacred oath.13 There were no ritual gestures, no priests or pastors, no masses or sermons; the lack of an appeal to the sacred is glaring. The traditional delegation of the maintenance of the ordo rerum to gods and holy things, to patron saints, relics, and images, was abolished and replaced by man-made sanctions. Therefore, as God himself could no longer force men to keep their word, multiple layers of constraints were built into the peace pacts: signatures, individual promises, judicial guaranties, exchanges of pledges, reminders of common financial interests, and practical devices. In so doing, pacts
13 The formula they used, “foy et serement presté par eux a Dieu” (faith and oath sworn to God), is a compromise: the faith sealed the agreement for the Huguenots, the oath for the Catholics.
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constituted both a reflection on the frailty of words of peace in time of war and an attempt to compensate for this weakness. The signatures on most of these pacts attest to an intention to bind a signer to verifiable obligations, whatever he might say in the future.14 But even the guarantee posed by the signature was not enough, inasmuch as it rested on the person’s postulated morality and constancy. It was thus reinforced by judicial guarantees: in Caen, for example, the inhabitants stipulated that “if one side gives offense to the other”, they could “all go to court for justice”. In many cases, moreover, these pacts were sworn before a local judge who became their legal guarantor. This is what happened in Compeyre, where the agreement was signed “before the honorable judge”.15 In addition, the peace agreement was backed by an economic guarantee, the financial interest helping to ensure that the parties would keep their word.16 The agreement made in Barre-des-Cévennes explicitly recalled that peace would “guarantee trade and commercial relations in a peaceful and communal way”.17 In Millau and in Nîmes, the pacts mentioned “freedom of trade”. The aim was not only to save peace by nobility of spirit but also to preserve business by sheer self-interest. Finally, pacts instituted material constraints in order to reduce the unpredictability of those who promised, as they did in Caen, not to use either daggers or swords. The maintenance of peace still resided otherwise in the good will of the contracting parties. And yet, the experience of past wars proved that good will alone could not be trusted. On several occasions then, objects served to mitigate human weakness and to force people to keep their word. City keys served this role of external constraint, unassailable by human will. One clause of SaintAffrique’s pact foresaw giving half the city keys to the Catholic consuls and the rest to the Huguenots, so that neither “could open the doors without the others”. The same was done in Casteljaloux, where the inhabitants decided to install two new locks, one of which was given to the Huguenot, the other to the Catholic consul.18 Keys facilitated
14
Béatrice Fraenkel, La Signature. Genèse d’un signe (Paris: 1992). AM Millau, CC 42, 2d inv. 16 Bruno Latour, La Clef de Berlin et autres leçons d’un amateur de sciences (Paris: 1993). 17 Jean-Paul Chabrol, La Cévenne au village. Barre des Cévennes sous l’Ancien régime: 1560–1830 (Aix-en-Provence: 1983), 182–183. 18 Archives Départementales [hereafter AD] Lot-et-Garonne, E SUP 2386 (1er sept. 1572). 15
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peace not by “internalizing a law” but by “externalizing a force”.19 The same was true for weapons, which were sometimes distributed equally among the inhabitants, thereby constituting a sort of balance of terror. Elsewhere, weapons were confiscated from both sides. In this way, arms reinforced the preservation of (words of ) peace by reifying an external constraint independent of the persons’ will. In this way, friendship pacts testify to a “local” capacity to make peace. Faced with external threats, it was essential that peace come from below. As the first consul of Montélimar declared on October 1, 1567, “it is necessary that peace come principally from us, and . . . it is expedient that we all, without regard to religious difference, live in peace, friendship and perpetual fraternity, like true fellow citizens”. When analyzing friendship pacts, two essential levels of peacekeeping are evident: neighborhood and municipality. Indeed, in many of the kingdom’s cities, especially the ones with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, everyone knew everyone.20 Consequently, it was much more difficult to achieve the anonymity of victims and tormentors that is a condition for a guilt-free massacre. On many occasions during the Wars of Religion, French people showed that they could consider themselves not only as anonymous representatives of antagonistic churches but also as neighbors. In Montferrand, at the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in September 1572, the consuls refused to jail Françoise Morel, a Huguenot, because of “her serious illness”.21 At the same time in Lisieux, the échevins let the Huguenot Albert de la Couyère go free because he was a surgeon.22 Health, profession, and wealth were all determinants of identity, along with confessional classifications, and could be used when a person was well known, as is the case in a small town. In Chalon-sur-Saône, maintaining neighborly relations took precedence over religious hatred: in September 1572, a number of Huguenots were “imprisoned in the homes of prominent Catholics, who would answer for them at the risk of their own lives”.23 Huguenots were not only heretics, but also sons and daughters, neigh-
19
B. Latour, La Clef de Berlin, 9. Mark Konnert, “La tolérance religieuse en Europe aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Une approche issue de la psychologie sociale et de la sociologie” in Thierry Wanegffelen (ed.), De Michel de l’Hospital à l’Edit de Nantes. Politique et religion face aux Eglises (Clermont-Ferrand: 2003), 97–113. 21 AD Puy-de-Dôme, E 113, Fonds [hereafter fds]. II, BB 20, fol. 20 vo. 22 AM Lisieux, BB 7, fol. 347 sq. 23 AM Chalon-sur-Saône, EE 1. 20
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bors and lover, rich and poor. The possibilities inherent in these multiple identities suggest that inter-confessional relationships at the time of the religious wars should not be reduced to confrontations. There were numerous ways of apprehending human relationships, even if religion remained the predominant framework within which identity was defined. Independent of any direct state intervention, inhabitants often managed to maintain peace between themselves. In many cities, for example Chalons-sur-Marne or Limoges,24 “municipalism” formed the other, powerful framework for circumventing confessional opposition and keeping the peace, independent of the state. That is why all the friendship pacts were made to the detriment of outsiders or strangers: in Millau for example, the authorities expelled all “the vagrants and vagabonds” ( gens sans adveu) and in Caen, it was forbidden for any innkeeper or inhabitant to accommodate strangers. The citizens of Saint-Laurent-des-Arbres declared that if “strangers” were to come to the city to attack either one of the religious groups, everyone should resist. The outsider embodied the insiders’ enemy, whatever his religious convictions, and was not owed the assistance granted to natives. Behind this rejection lay the perception of a double weakness. The vagrant (expelled, whatever his religion) was assumed to be so poor that he could be bought to betray the city. Second and more important, he lacked the familial and personal bonds that linked the inhabitants of a small community. In Limoges, as elsewhere, Huguenots enjoyed a selective tolerance depending on their birthplace. A Protestant could claim his right to safety because his citizen “pedigree” prevailed over his heterodoxy.25 Municipal pride appears to have been stronger than confessional exclusiveness, establishing a hierarchy of priorities that can be found in various other cities that avoided massacres. In 1572, municipalism seems still to have been a pertinent framework for maintaining peace and containing the turmoil of religious fighting. Friendship pacts were relatively efficient, even though their existence cannot by itself explain the preservation of order: Most cities with those agreements nevertheless avoided violence. 24 Michel Cassan, Le Temps des Guerres de Religion. Le Cas du Limousin (Paris: 1996); Mark Konnert, “Urban Values versus Religious Passions: Châlons-sur-Marne during the Wars of Religion”, Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (1987): 387–405. 25 Michel Cassan, “Les choix politiques et confessionnels de la ville natale de Jean Dorat durant la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle et les débuts du XVIIe siècle” in Christine de Buzon and Jean-Eudes Girot (eds.) Jean Dorat. Poète humaniste de la Renaissance, Actes du colloque international Limoges, 6–8 juin 2001 (Genève: 2007), 47–63.
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However, several vertical logics came to thwart the solidity of these horizontal bonds. In the first place, by writing the oath the inhabitants attested, in spite of their sincerity, to the indelible distrust that had settled into the heart of the city with the religious schism. Why else would they spell out the conditions of their agreement? Not long before, the cohabitation of inhabitants in their diversity had occurred without fuss, free from worries and promises, in the humdrum routine of daily life. The friendship pacts, on the contrary, left nothing tacit. In itself, the need to put into writing the conditions of social cohesion already indicates a crack in municipal harmony. We thus discover that in Châlon-sur-Saône in 1572, several Catholics who first had agreed to imprison Huguenots in their homes began to “be wary” of them and asked to have them placed “into the prisons of the tax collector [receveur] and bishop”.26 The fact that the inhabitants largely borrowed from the “language of state”, as can be seen in analyzing the language of the compacts, also shows that the subjects were seeking external guarantees for the maintenance of law and order. The recurring conception behind the pacts is that of friendship, which, if not always present, is frequent enough to have nothing random about it. It derives from a common fund of Christian values widely shared by both confessions. Since the Middle Ages, the concept of friendship had frequently been used in arbitration proceedings and the regulation of the social relationships. Moreover, Raymond Mentzer has shown how frequently consistories mobilized the terminology of friendship to regulate conflicts within the Protestant community.27 For us, the origin of this vocabulary of friendship is nevertheless to be sought elsewhere—with the king, his agents, his regulations, and his administrators, in particular the commissioners charged with enforcing the edicts. Neither the Bible nor even the Christian tradition was the source from which this concept of friendship was borrowed. Besides the fact that numerous theologians were very far from inciting brotherly friendship between confessions, the rhetoric of these pacts reflects more of a Ciceronian vocabulary. But these citations (“broth-
26
AM Chalon-Sur-Saône, BB 5, fol. 210 vo (5 septembre 1572). Raymond A. Mentzer, La Construction de l’identité réformée aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: le rôle des consistoires (Paris: 2006). 27
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ers, friends and fellow citizens”) owe less to the great success of the De Amicitia in the 16th century, than to royal legislation and, in particular, to the edicts of pacification: already in the Edict of January 1562, the Crown deplored the “dissolution of the bonds of friendship” in the kingdom. The Edict of Amboise (March 1563) was the first example of the King ordering his subjects of both confessions “to contain themselves and live peacefully together as brothers, friends and fellow citizens”. The Edicts of Longjumeau (August 1568) and Saint-Germain (August 1570) reiterated this injunction in an identical way. In July 1572, on the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Charles IX published an injunction to all his subjects to live in friendship with one another. When rereading the pacts, the similarity of language leaves no doubt: in 1572, the inhabitants of Saint-Affrique promised “to live and remain in peace with one another like brothers, friends and fellow citizens” (freres, amys et concitoiens) and proclaimed between them “peace, love and friendship”. Those of Nant, in August 1568, “both of one religion and the other [. . .] said and affirmed they wanted to live in good and perfect peace”. They thus repeated word for word the terms of the pacification edicts, which served to mediate between local communities and Ciceronian ideas. This is all the more true in that the edicts of pacification were very widely disseminated in France, whether in printed, handwritten, or oral form. In 1564, François Coderc, notary of the clerk’s office of Millau, was paid six pounds for having forwarded a copy of the pacification edicts to the nearby cities of Compierre, Saint-Affrique, Nant, Cornus, le Pont-de-Camarès, and Saint-Lyons. In 1571, the bailiwick of Auxerre spent 40 pounds to pay a sergeant to disseminate the texts of the pacification edict throughout its jurisdiction. Charles IX enjoined the magistrates ( justiciers) and officers of his provinces to have the articles of the pacification edicts read and published “throughout the most common and frequented places in their jurisdictions by public criers with trumpets sounding and to have them posted in the most frequented places in their jurisdictions”.28 In particular, the commissioners sent 28 Le reiglement donne par le commandemenet du roy charles IX Nostre souverain seigneur, sur le faict de lentretienement de l’Edict par luy cy devant faict, pour la pacification des troubles du royaulme. Publie par le commendement et en presence de Monsieur le conte du lude gouverneur pour ledict seigneur en ce pais de poictou des seigneurs de cusse, et des masparraulte commissaires deputez pour la pacification desdictz troubles en la ville de Poictiers, capitalle dudict pays le vendredy XIIe iour du moys de novembre 1563, (Poitiers: 1563).
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by the king to enforce the edicts of pacification in the provinces were indispensable agents of this broadcasting of the peace in the provinces. From town to town, they everywhere had the text of the edicts read, published, copied, and distributed; they explained the contents and enforced them. As the commissioners had ordered in prohibiting insults and the use of force, physical and verbal violence were in turn forbidden by the pacts. The inhabitants thus promised not “to offend one another by word or by deed,” for example, in Caen and Annonay. In a systematic way, the commissioners had the king’s subjects swear an oath to respect the edicts of pacification. In February 1571, for example, the marshal of Vieilleville, appointed by the king to enforce the Edict of Saint-Germain, made the councillors of the Parliament of Dijon, the officers, the mayor, and the aldermen of Bourgogne “swear to respect the edict of pacification” with “raised hand”.29 In Montélimar, the commissioners Bauquemare and la Madeleine received an oath from the new consuls to respect the king’s edicts.30 The same was done in La Rochelle in January 1571, when Marshal Cossé made Catholics and Huguenots swear to respect the edict of pacification. By acting this way, the monarch was proclaiming himself the principal author of the constraints on the speeches that aimed at official reception. And friendship was thus fixed in grammar. The oaths of obedience and the edicts themselves constituted the frame of reference for the communities, which often renewed in the pact their promise to respect the edicts of pacification. The use of the concepts of friendship and citizenship throughout the pacts can be read as the reiteration of the oath of obedience sworn to the commissioners: the inhabitants of Millau explicitly admitted this when they affirmed acting “just as they had previously promised at the publication of the edict, made in this present city before the commissioner delegated for this occasion”.31 And indeed, just one year earlier, commissioners Jehan de Tambonneau and the marquess of Villars had administered an oath of friendship to the Millavois. In Nimes, on August 30, 1572, when inhabitants of both confessions promised that they “would maintain and preserve one another in all security and liberty of persons and properties, as true citizens, inhabitants of the same city, can and must be, without allowing the use of violence against any 29 Louis Etienne Acere, Histoire de la ville de La Rochelle et du pays d’Aulnis, vol. 1 (1756; repr. Marseille: 1975), 389. 30 AM Montélimar, BB 46, fol. 34 sq. 31 Joël Rigal (ed.), Mémoires d’un calviniste de Millau (Rodez: 1911), 222.
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inhabitants”,32 they repeated in part the oath taken before Damville, a commissioner for the Edict of Saint-Germain, who, on September 16, 1570, had the same men swear “to keep, have kept, obey and observe without violation the edict, in keeping with its form and content, and promising one another fidelity, loyalty and security. Promising one another on penalty of death that neither on their account nor by their means would anything be done prejudicial to one another’s person or property or to the content of the edict”.33 In this context, friendship had the character of a quotation, and peace was built on a local use of royal initiatives, decided in cooperation with the inhabitants. Consequently, a strictly internalist analysis of those pacts would prove ineffective: firstly, because they made explicit references to the royal legislation; secondly, because the ideal point of reception for these agreements, namely the state, must be kept in mind. These pacts thus had an external as well as an internal function. They not only aimed to make peace but also to say that peace was made: they had a proclamative or demonstrative intention. It was important for the inhabitants to show themselves to be peaceful because they had everything to gain from being in accordance with the ideals promoted by the Crown. These small and average cities had everything to lose in appearing too divided; a violent, interconfessional conflict was a golden opportunity for the monarchy to intensify its presence by sending in governors or garrisons or even by establishing state control over the guarding of the city. In towns like Orléans or Lyon, where confessional tension was profound, the monarchy decided in 1564 to erect citadels in order to ensure the defense of the city. Consequently, the inhabitants, both Huguenots and Catholics, would rather play down their level of inter-confessional violence by appropriating a rhetoric and practices approved—and tested—by the Crown. In Pont-Saint-Esprit (Languedoc), for example, both confessions multiplied the promises and appearances of good agreement; and yet, rather than representing a precocious ideal of “tolerance”, their primary (and admitted) motivation lay in their common will to be exempted from the imposition of a gendarmerie by the governor.34 In the same way, the consuls of Chalon-sur-Saône wrote in 1572 that they did not need a garrison, given “that they were well united and 32
AM Nîmes, LL 11 (August 30, 1572). AM Nîmes, DD 3, pièce 7 (September 16, 1570). 34 AM Pont Saint-Esprit, BB 2, fol. 26–27 (January 1564) and fol. 38–39 (August 1564). 33
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peaceful”.35 In other words, besides the information they conveyed, friendship pacts communicated a message to the king and his agents, among others. They represent a stake in rule as much as a stake in peace. Hence, these very local pacts cannot be understood independently of the national and, in particular, the political context within which they fit. Because the signers of these pacts anticipated material and symbolic advantages from compliance with the state’s rules, they mobilized the language of legitimacy, that of peace and friendship. In embracing the king’s words, the inhabitants asked him to compel them to keep their word.36 Indeed, despite the pacts, when confronted with a crisis, neither personal morality, nor neighborly solidarity, nor even municipal authority ever seemed strong enough to uphold the peace. It was rather the king who, as a last resort, came to strengthen social cohesion, bearing witness to a transition from “community” to “society,” which characterizes the Wars of Religion.37 The monarch established himself as a form of externalization of constraint, through the citizens’ “delegation of their lost morality”.38 Now the question is to understand how the monarch, through his work of pacification, answered local needs by elaborating, in cooperation with his subjects, solutions for the crisis of the religious wars.
The Commissioners: Men of the King or Middle-men between Monarch and Subject? “The needs of the times” forced the young Charles IX to authorize the reformed religion in his kingdom, in order to preserve its unity and to keep peace. The King’s conciliatory politics met with great resistance,
35
AM Chalon-sur-Saône, EE 1. Jérémie Foa, “Gebrauchsformen der Freundschaft. Freundschaftsverträge und Gehorsamseide zu Beginn der Religionskriege” in Klaus Oschema (ed.), Freundschaft oder amitié ? Ein politisch-soziales Konzept der Vormoderne im zwischensprachlichen Vergleich (15.–17. Jahrhundert) (Zeitschrift historischer Forschung. Beihefte) 40 (Berlin: 2007), 109–135. 37 Marcel Mauss, “La cohésion sociale dans les sociétés polysegmentaires” (1931), Œuvres, vol. 3: Cohésion sociale et divisions de la sociologie (Paris: 1969), 13; Ferdinand Tönnies, Communauté et société: catégories fondamentales de la sociologie pure (1887; repr. Paris: 1977). Tönnies writes that “whereas, in the Community, people remained bounded in spite of any separation, they are, in the Society, separated in spite of any connection” (81). Here, in spite of the pact of union, the signatories remained separate. 38 B. Latour, La Clef de Berlin, 9. 36
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especially from the traditional seats of royal authority (parlements, bailliages, governors, municipalities, etc.). As a result, the monarch dispatched commissioners to execute his policies, even if it meant bypassing recalcitrant administrators. They had to apply the peace legislation, to attribute temples and cemeteries to the Huguenots, to share municipal responsibilities between both confessions, to return confiscated goods and offices seized, and to settle local disputes.39 These commissioners were chosen by the monarch alone from among his most faithful servants.40 Their commissions were revocable at will, and they answered only to the king. Our present state of knowledge enables us to estimate the number of direct commissioners of the Edict of January at about ten men, those of the Edict of Amboise at about 30, and those of the Edict of Saint-Germain at about 20.41 To this must be added the even greater number—at the very least, 20—of commissioners for the “final completion” (parachèvement) of the edicts, who toiled in the wake of the first commissioners, as well as perhaps 20 men specially appointed to local missions and the assistants of the commissioners. We may safely say that there were, at a conservative estimate, about 100 royal agents working for the pacification of the realm between 1561 and 1574. Thus, the process of pacification and the invention of the commissioners for the enforcement of the edicts—whose links with future intendants have recently been stressed42—confirm that the civil wars contributed in more ways than intellectually to the modernization of the state. Pacification was thus a driving force behind the “executive turn” taken by the French monarchy at the end of the 16th century. During these singular times, the Crown favored extraordinary over ordinary administrative agencies.
39 Commission expédiée par le Roy pour envoyer par les provinces de ce royaume certains commissaires pour faire entretenir l’edict et traicté sur la pacification des troubles advenuz en iceluy (Paris: 1563). 40 Jérémie Foa, Le Tour de la Paix. Missions et commissions d’application des édits de pacification sous le règne de Charles IX (1560–1574), (Ph.D. diss., Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2008). 41 The Peace of Longjumeau (1568) which was too ephemeral, did not give the Crown enough time to despatch agents to implement it. There were some exceptions, however, among them the mission of the maréchal de Vieilleville and of René de Bourgneuf in the West. (Archives Nationales (AN) J 1037, pièce 31 and Bibliothèque Municipale (BM) Angers, Ms. 297). 42 Michel Antoine, “Des chevauchées aux intendances: filiation réelle ou putative?”, Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de France (1994): 35–65.
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jérémie foa Table 1—Peace commissioners in January 1562 (Edict of January)
Guyenne
Blaise de Monluc, Charles de Coucys, Nicolas Compaing, and Pierre Girard
Provence and Dauphiné
Antoine de Crussol, André Ponnat, and Anthoine Fumée
Languedoc
Michel Quelain and Jehan de la Guesle
Table 2—Peace commissioners in March 1563 (Edict of Amboise) Bourgogne and Nivernais
Estienne Charlet and Jehan de Monceaux.
Bretagne
Estienne Lallemant de Voulzay and Pierre de Chantecler.
Champagne and Brie
No commissioners.
Guyenne
Anthoine Fumée, Jerosme Angenoust, thereafter Jacques Viart.
Ile-de-France
Mathieu Chartier and Pierre de Longueil.
Languedoc
Jean-Jacques de Mesmes and Jacques de Bauquemare.
Lyonnais, Auvergne Bourbonnais (etc.)
Michel Quelain and Gabriel Myron.
Normandie
Jacques Viole and Jehan de la Guesle.
Orléanais and Berry
Baptiste de Machault.
Picardie
Charles de Lamoignon and François le Cirier.
Poitou, Saintonge, La Rochelle, and Aunis
René de Bourgneuf and Pierre de Masparraulte.
Provence and Dauphiné
Jacques Phellypeaux and Jessé de Bauquemare.
Touraine, Anjou, and Maine
François Briçonnet, Arnoul Bouche,r and Jehan de Lavau.
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Table 3—Peace commissioners in August 1570 (Edict of Saint-Germain) Champagne, Bourgogne, Auvergne, and Bourbonnais
Nicolas Potier and Charles de Lamoignon.
Guyenne
Robert de Montdoulcet and René Crespin.
Paris and Ile-de-France
Estienne Lallemant and Jessé de Bauquemare.
Normandie and Picardie
Anthoine Fumée and Simon Roger.
Lyonnais, Dauphiné, Provence, and Languedoc
Edouard Molé, Jehan de Belot, and Claude Faulcon.
Orléanais, Anjou, Bretagne, and Poitou
Philippe Gourreau de la Proustière and François Pain.
Complaint as Catharsis Every time the commissioners arrived in a city or a village, they summoned a general assembly, composed of inhabitants of both confessions, whom they encouraged to come present their complaints. At the end of the assembly of Aulnay, in Sainctonge, in October 1563, commissioners Bourgneuf and Masparraulte invited the inhabitants to come to them “to have justice done”.43 In Lyon, commissioners Quelain and Myron declared that “those whose goods had been taken and usurped . . . could apply to them for justice”.44 Even though a great number of remonstrances are today lost, several sources show that inhabitants literally overwhelmed commissioners with their complaints.45 More than 150 complaints have been found in the archives. In Valence, for example, in February 1572, an inhabitant worried about the number of “affairs which are every day presented before the honorable commissioners” and described the plaintiffs’ craving to have the ear of the prince.46 It is thus evident that, if the commissioners were imposed from above, their power increased as they answered requests from
43 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscrits Français (hereafter BNF, Ms. fr.) 15878, fol. 149 vo. 44 AM Lyon, BB 83, fol. 132 (19 août 1563). 45 J. Foa, Le Tour de la Paix . . . , 6, 279–366 « La prise de la parole ». 46 AM Montélimar, BB 53, fol. 41.
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below. As Hans Maier pointed out in his study on Polizeiwissenschaft,47 serious problems concerning the preservation of peace and economic and religious questions proliferated at the end of the 16th century in a way that forced the state to come to the aid of the traditional organs of self-government. The king’s subjects collaborated decisively in this process, through their representatives or, in this case, by multiplying requests sent to the monarchy. During the slow progress toward the “disciplinary society” described by Michel Foucault, governing powers more than ever sought people’s confidences, competed for their confessions, and invited ever more indiscretions.48 Handling this continuous stream of requests required considerable effort on the part of the state: instituting precise networks for the deposit, transmission, and examination of petitions and requests, fixing requirements of style and codification of the expected formulae, setting a maximum size for texts submitted to the authorities, determining protocol for requests for supporting documents. But the activities of the applicants also contributed to the standardization of forms and strategies, because, in their desire to see their request succeed, they addressed themselves to specialized intermediaries, taking up tried forms, anticipating the criteria of examination and judgment of the authorities to whom they turned and, at the same time, juggling this imposed rhetoric and their desire for a distinctive self-presentation. This anticipation of the eye of the state explains why the religious conflicts did not weaken with peace, but rather changed strategies, continuing by other means, particularly legal ones. In other words, the opponents did not at all give up on “conquering” their enemies, but the weapon of choice, henceforth, the one that brought about the best results, was an appeal to the justice system. The confessional confrontations were thus the occasion, not only of a judicial transformation of the religious conflicts, but also of a larger appropriation of judicial authority by the subjects, favoring the intervention of new actors, neither theologians nor military men, but rather jurists. Inhabitants of both faiths engaged lawyers, taking advice from specialists in the law to formulate their complaints adequately and to have their opponents condemned successfully. For example, the mayor and the échevins of
47 Hans Maier, Die Ältere deutsche Staats-und Verwaltungslehre: Polizeiwissenschaft, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Wissenschaft in Deutschland (Berlin: 1966). 48 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, (1975; repr. Paris: 1993), 225–227.
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Tours requested five lawyers from the présidial to attend “the assemblies, to deliberate and advise on what complaints and demands they should place before the king’s commissioners for the enforcement of the edict of pacification”. The consuls of Romans turned to a certain Marcel, a “lawyer from Grenoble”, “presently in the commissioners’ retinue”. In this way, as Olivier Christin observed, pacification was “a boon to jurists”.49 In their complaints, the petitioners had to adopt a precise grammar, formulated in detail by the commissioners. The conditions laid down by the latter forbade insults; on the contrary, petitioners should express their intention to seek the common good and not only the benefit of a confessional group. It follows that the corpus of complaints sent to the agents of the Crown is free from any offensive name calling: Huguenots were never labeled “heretics”, but rather as belonging to the “alleged religion”, in sharp contrast to contemporary pamphlet literature. And Catholics were no longer called “papists.” In the archives, the proliferation of trials for insult shows the progress of this policing of language as a tangible element of peaceful coexistence. Jehan de Mercieu did not hesitate to go to court to “obtain redress” for having been called a “Huguenot” in Dardilly. At the same time, a potter from Amiens lodged a complaint for having been “called a Huguenot”. Rewarded with 20 sous for damages, he gained more by complaining than by fighting.50 In the same way, the plaintiffs’ arguments were strictly secularized: one could no longer hope to win in court by claiming to be a better Christian, but rather by presenting the most convincing argument, the one most in compliance with the law. This ceaseless to and fro between local and national horizons is manifest in the first motive for complaint (one-fifth of all affairs), namely questions of worship. Charles IX’s commissioners had to provide the Huguenots with churches: in addition to the two churches they held inside cities when peace was concluded (on March 7, 1563, for the Edict of Amboise and August 1, 1570, for the Edict of SaintGermain respectively), Huguenots were entitled to one church in the suburbs of a city in each bailliage by the Edict of Amboise and two in each government district by the Edict of Saint-Germain. But where was this place of worship to be established? Was it to be established
49 50
Olivier Christin, La paix de religion . . . , 104. AD Rhône, BP 314; AM Amiens, CC 178, fol. 42 vo.
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in the region’s principal city or, on the contrary, in some remote village? Was it to look like a true place of worship, with a real dignity, an obvious focal point, or, on the contrary, would it have to remain discrete and worshippers to be satisfied with the featureless facade of a private house? If the Huguenots had a stake in obtaining a nearby, representative place, the Catholics’ aim was just the opposite—to place the Huguenot church as far away as possible. In all the complaints they sent the commissioners for this purpose, the Huguenots demanded churches nearby, not on grounds of salvation, but always on grounds of public order: a remote site would force them into clandestinity and thereby arouse new disorders. Similarly, the Catholics’ arguments to keep the churches at a distance never mentioned the threat that such a presence posed to their salvation, nor even the fear of heretical “pollution”. If these underlying confessional motives remained unspoken, the rules of the game forced the Catholics to stress the economic or military risks connected with the construction of a Huguenot church. To this end, the use of “perverse effect” rhetoric, that is to say “warning” about the unexpected risks of too close a Huguenot church, became the favored weapon of the anti-church petitioners. It allowed the opponents, while claiming to adhere to, even to applaud, the project of peaceful coexistence, to denounce the means implemented to reach this goal. This technique of secularizing arguments is quite obvious in Nantes, where the aldermen with help from the clergy used all the wealth of their empirical knowledge of the city to avoid the installation of a reformed place of worship: in their presentation, the suburb of Beauregard is not a highly sacred place and thus incompatible with the celebration of the Huguenot cult; it is not profaned by the church, but rather is “a small island on the bridges”, which indicates clearly the inconvenience for “the king and the city [should the Huguenots] control the crossing of the bridges”. The aldermen warned the commissioners of the unfortunate consequences for business if a Huguenot church were to be built in this suburb (“with this celebration of services, trade would be entirely interrupted”).51 This argument allowed the debate to be confined outside of the religious field, that is to say, to politicize it, while giving it a technical form. The impartial criterion of the kingdom’s security offered an acceptable replacement for the inadmissible religious criterion. It matters little that the sub-
51
AM Nantes, GG 643, 3 (1564).
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jects never confessed what really worried them, what truly bothered their conscience or motivated them to act as they did, whether fear for their salvation or hope for their adversaries’ damnation. What matters is the obligation they felt to articulate their opposition in a technical and legal way, in order to convince the commissioner and, along with him, the Crown. What is important is that they forced themselves to keep silent about the confessional motivations for their confrontations and instead based their justifications on a secularized formula of the common good, in a “seesaw of arguments” that Jon Elster christened the “civilizing strength of hypocrisy”.52 As the place par excellence where religious conflict was immediately translated into political arguments, the question of the location of Huguenot churches facilitated the legal, or rather technical, conversion of religious confrontations. Here, more than anywhere else, it became essential for the believers to put up a convincing front and to collect the essential technical information, the forgotten detail that would prohibit or, on the contrary, legitimize the installation of the church, the one that carried the day would have proven, not how the salvation of all was threatened, but rather how the fundamental interests of most of the inhabitants suffered or benefited from such a presence. From this followed the obligatory detour through economic advantage or military strategy (“the nearby countries are not without suspicion of disorders, as is evidenced by the recent news of the surprise attempted in Lorraine”), the behavior of the crowds (“crowding together of persons of opposing religions in a so small place would be an occasion for popular violence”), young people’s behavior (“students of both religions could always produce some dissension”), sociological analysis (the place is “inhabited by bargemen and fishermen”),53 etc. In their judgments, commissioners thus had to take into account not only the law of the prince and all of these “warnings”, but also the balance of power between Huguenots and Catholics, and, depending upon the circumstances, they had to authorize construction of a church more or less distant from the principal city. In places where the Protestants were numerous, rich, well supported politically, or participant in city government, they were able to secure closer places of
52 Jon Elster, “Argumenter et négocier dans deux Assemblées constituantes”, Revue française de science politique, 44 (1994): 186–256, cit., 191. 53 AM Nantes, GG 643, pièce 3 (1564).
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worship. Conversely, wherever they were meagrely endowed, their places of worship were remote and erected in places with a high concentration of negative characteristics. The Huguenots of Lyon, for example, had to make do with Quincieu, which they described despairingly as an “old clod of earth”.54 In reaching their decisions, the commissioners employed a justice of conciliation, closer to medieval traditions than to modern conceptions of justice, but also quicker to pacify conflicting parties than implementation of the law at all costs. Forgiveness as a Way for Peace In Lyon, a Catholic witness affirmed that the demand for an exhaustive restoration of possessions seized during the wars set the inhabitants against one another—in particular the Catholics against the Protestants—more than the military confrontations had. Claude de Rubys asserted that the Catholics were summoned daily before commissioner Jean Jacques de Mesmes “for frivolous things and of little value, such as for the return of a parrot, an anvil, a jar of fat, a pound of candles, and an infinite number of other things of the same sort”. He concluded that the actions of the commissioner had tragically “animated the inhabitants of the city against one another more than all the disorders and past civil wars had done: and this wound continued bleeding until the news arrived of the action taken against the Protestants on Saint Bartholomew’s Sunday, August 24, 1572”. We need not accept Claude de Ruby’s charges against the commissioners to realize that pacification and justice did not always go hand in hand. The commissioners, more than the inhabitants, had a keen consciousness of the irreversibility of the “time of troubles”. Through their daily actions, they knew that not everything was reparable, neither the deaths, nor the wounds. More than justice, they sought concord. No one could return Gilbert Douxsaintz, a Huguenot from Clermont killed during the Corpus Christi procession of 1568, to his inconsolable widow. Despite the request for reparations she presented, the commissioners refused to pursue the culprits. In Lisieux, a few years earlier, in August 1563, commissioners Viole and La Guesle had imposed a similar “silence” on Christine Hébert, a Catholic, concerning the
54
AM Lyon, GG 77, fol. 2 (1571).
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murder of her husband, killed in a confrontation with Huguenots that occurred during the disorders of the first civil war.55 Forgetting served to strengthen the peace and avoid the renewal of conflicts, which a too pointed inquiry could not fail to bring about. In Saint Maixent, the commissioners wrote to the king to tell him that peace was favored by such a selectivity: the inhabitants “gave up part of their vengeances and their hope to get it by means of our commission”. When the commissioners declared to the inhabitants that “what they complained was forgiven and abolished”, was peace facilitated or pretexts given to those, deprived of justice, who would take up arms to have the revenge that the court refused to them? Inhabitants had to give up the reopening of a cycle of vengeance, not their own memories. But the commissioners always had to take into account the balance of power—and much fewer legal standards—when they made themselves censors and rewrote history with their complaints, when they moralized it by sorting out legitimate and illegitimate conflicts. Obviously, one had more chances to keep the goods acquired during the disorders, to escape revenge or persecution, if he was more powerful. The politics of forgiveness then contributed to the concentration of precious power in the hands of the king—the one of changing confrontations into glorious exploits or into news items. The monarch and his commissioners, thus, gained a capital of loyalty from those who took advantage of their generosity, who would put their hearts into protecting a peace that was in their favor, and who were courted all the more since they were numerous. Forgiveness yielded thus a profit to be reinvested and used for the benefit of pacification, the benefit of “notabilization”, as well as the benefit of dominion. Making peace required privileging political considerations over juridical ones. The agents of the king preferred forgiveness to systematic repair, following the Edict of Amboise, which decreed that “any insults and offense that the injustice of time had generated between our subjects, and all other things past and caused by these present tumults, would stay switched off, as died, buried and not happened” The “not happened” expression celebrated the magic of the operation—turning back the clock, rewriting history—that is, the miracle carried out by the politics of reconciliation. While refusing forgiveness, the inhabitants were condemned to blame themselves ceaselessly for the past and
55
BNF, Ms. fr. 16221, fol. 122 vo.
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to see ad infinitum the renewal of conflicts. In Amiens, as everywhere else, the commissioners thus ordered the inhabitants not “to scold and provoke the one the other by criticism of what has happened”. A possible coexistence required inhabitants not only to trust in the future (promoted by the oath), but also to forget the past. It is why the commissioners hoped to confine the future by oath and attempted to cancel the past by forgiveness. The possibility of a peace was based on a political negation of the inherent limits of human time. Politics, indeed, allowed the commissioners to deny the irreversibility of the past by encouraging forgiveness, as well as to decrease the uncertainty of the future by the swearing oaths. Living together during the religious confrontations thus required playing human political powers against human anthropological limits. That could only strengthen the state, manipulator par excellence of this symbolic reformulation of temporal borders. As Hannah Arendt noted, living with the “other” is the condition of forgiveness quite as that of promise (because nothing can force a man to forgive himself, and a promise sworn to one’s self is not very binding);56 the religious confrontations, as they arose from the daily presence of the “other”, precipitated the process of politicization of society. By making more imperative the necessity of forgetting and committing, the civil wars precipitated the formation of the modern political state. Finally, if the commissioners remained nomads and their pacificatory work never became long-lasting, it remains necessary to present the spaces of debate they created as a means to facilitate the adoption of peaceful behaviors by the subjects of the king. Peace through Local-level Politics During the wars, city council and consulates became homogeneous in their religious observance, the dominant confession having excluded from power the members of the minority confession. This was the case in Troyes, in Lyon, and in Montauban for example. As a result, confessional conflict could no longer be expressed peacefully, could no longer occur without damage to civic unity. It is all the more regrettable, because the coexistence of two opposite confessions in a single
56 Hannah Arendt, La Condition de l’homme moderne, (1961; repr. Paris: 1983), 301–314.
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territory generated countless conflicts that had to be mediated. Lacking such mediation, they found resolution in the streets, in blood. The aftermath of the religious wars did not bring an end to religious conflict, but rather provided it a strict frame of expression: symbolic spaces regulated by standards of debate and decision that were not violent; religious validation of political processes that forced the consent of the opponents. In Grenoble, for example, a city violently torn by competing confessions, the consuls decreed in December 1563, at the request of the commissioners, that “from now, those who would want to pray to God in the councils would do so in a low voice and in secret freely”. The necessity of secularizing the decision-making space resulted from that confessional coexistence, implemented by the commissioners. They ordered in a systematic way that subjects of both confessions be allowed “in the councils”, independently of their relative, demographic importance. In September, 1563, the commissioner La Madeleine authorized the Huguenots of Briançon to attend continuously the general assemblies “with deliberative voice”; this offered them a chance to politicize their opposition—that is, at once to demilitarize and secularize it. At the same time, the commissioner Pot de Chemault decreed in Blois that “general assemblies for the business of the city” would include the Huguenots. The commissioners even went so far as fixing quotas, as they did in Aix in October 1564, by ordering that “those of the new religion” would constitute one-quarter of the council. The measure was extraordinary on two counts and attested a greater interventionism on the part of the Crown in the municipal political management: first, the commissioner place the Huguenots in the heart of power in a city with a Catholic majority; and second, he cancelled the former election of hardly one month earlier, that is September 24, 1564, made “according to the traditional way”. The agents of the peace went even farther in Lyon, Gap, Millau, Nîmes, Béziers, Montpellier, and Vienne by imposing the election of an equal number of Catholic and Huguenot consuls. When such an intervention in the “local liberties” seemed impossible, the commissioners attempted to bypass the consulate by refusing to mediate its confessional disputes. They thus instituted a parallel, mixed authority, the task of which was to calm these conflicts. This is what they undertook in Romans, negotiating the creation of an assembly of 30 men, 15 Catholics and 15 Huguenots, in charge of the daily problems created by confessional coexistence.57 57
AM Romans, BB 10, fol. 109 (October 1563).
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As the traditional appeal to restore the sacred was powerless, the commissioners found in the political space a privileged place for the recreation of social consensus; as it was impossible to resort, as formerly, to processions or masses to restore peace and unity, the community was invited to mend itself in those man-made spaces. Distinguishing the corps of citizens from the corps of believers, the Crown dissolved the unity of the mystic corps of the city. It created a secular public community “which was not a break of the link with God, of course, but was the recognition of the human part, thus of the contingent, in the political construction”.58 In this autonomous space, affairs dealing with the salvation of the believers would not been decided; henceforth, they would be reserved to the churches only. This mixed management offered a deconsecrated future: the secular political space would concern itself exclusively with the collection of the taxes, the preservation of weapons, the renovation of bulwarks, the purification of streets, the organization of the holidays, etc. By facilitating the access of minorities to city hall, the commissioners encouraged a commitment to the political space, competent from now on to resolve disputes among the inhabitants. Opponents granted a new importance to political methods. Struggling to achieve a position of strength within these political assemblies, from the city councils to the consulates, the inhabitants attested to an important modification in the tactics of confessional confrontation and mobilization. In these spaces, invented by royal commissioners and appropriated by local inhabitants, the pacification of inter-confessional relations was achieved from below as well as above. During the religious wars, the state had no means, neither material nor intellectuals, to impose from the top a peace nobody wanted. On the contrary, fragile as it was, the peace fed on ceaseless exchanges between the state and the localities and built itself upon permanent negotiation between the Crown and its subject. It was not a matter of dissolving political hierarchies, monarchical authority, or Catholic domination into a negotiated order of social exchanges, nor of succumbing to the illusion of a juridical communism that would make everyone equally competent agents in negotiating peace. The question is: how, on the ground and through the mediation of the commis-
58 Arlette Jouanna, “L’Edit de Nantes et le processus de sécularisation de l’Etat”, Paix des armes, paix des âmes, (Paris: 2000), 481–489.
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sioners, did monarchical prescriptions undergo tests of validity, from which they might be adopted, amended, or rejected, as the case may be? And how, in return, did new, local solutions pass tests of pertinence before commissioners who could, at any time, deny or accept them and then submit them for the Crown’s approval? In this respect, we can consider the commissioners “public intermediaries”, whose task was to validate or invalidate both the juridical orders of the state and local-empirical solutions.59 Table 4—Friendship pacts under the reign of Charles IX Ville
Date
Grenade-sur-Garonne Chalon-sur-Saône
May 1562i May 18, 1562ii
First civil war (March 1, 1562–March 19, 1563)
Lectoure Valence
April 15, 1564 October 8, 1565
Peace of Amboise (March 1563–September 1567)
Vienne Montélimar Orange Casteljaloux Mâcon Caen Annonay
September 29, 1567 October 1, 1567 October 2, 1567 October 1567iii October 3, 1567iv October 3, 1567 October (?), 1567
Nant St-Lrt des Arbres Nyons Nyons
August 1568v 3rd civil war August 14, 1568vi September 12, 1568vii (September 1569–August September 28, 1568viii 8, 1570)
59
2nd civil war (September 1567–March 23, 1568)
Alain Cottereau “Dénis de justice, dénis de réalité: remarques sur la réalité sociale et sa dénégation”, in Renaud Dulong, Pascale Gruson, (eds.), L’expérience du déni (Paris: 1999), 159–189; idem, “Droit et bon droit. Un droit des ouvriers instauré, puis évincé par le droit du travail (France, XIXe siècle),” Annales, 6 (2002): 1521–1557.
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Table 4 (cont.) Ville
Date
Nîmes Nyons Chalon-sur-Saône Casteljaloux Millau Compeyre Saint-Affrique Barre-des-Cévennes
August 30, 1572ix August 31, 1572x August 31, 1572xi September 1, 1572xii September 2, 1572xiii September 10, 1572xiv September 14, 1572xv September 19, 1572xvi
4th civil war (October. 1572–July 1573)
i AD Haute Garonne, 3 E 11400, fol. 108 v°–109 (minutier du notaire Algayrès, année 1562). ii Claude Perry, Histoire ecclésiastique et civile ancienne et moderne de la ville et cité de Chalons sur Saone (Chalon-sur-Saône: 1659), 327: “les habitans faisans profession de l’une et de l’autre religion vivroient paisiblement ensemble et conformement aux edicts du Roy”. iii Jean-François Samazeuilh, Histoire de l’Agenais, du Condomois et du Bazadais (1847–1848), 130–134. iv Ami Bost, Histoire de l’église protestante de Mâcon (Mâcon: 1977), 134. v Elie Mazel, Les Guerres de religion à Nant et le pays d’extrême Haute-Marche du Rouergue (Carrère: 1920) 39 sq. On September 11, 1568, Nant was in Protestant hands. vi AD Vaucluse, 1 G 258, fol. 46–48. vii Pacts of Lyon, Vienne, Montélimar, Orange, Caen, Annonay, and Saint-Laurentdes-Arbres have been published by O. Christin, La paix de religion. L’autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle (Paris: 1997), 311–318. viii Baudoin, Histoire de la Ligue en Bourgogne, t. I, 369. ix AM Nîmes, LL 11 (30 août 1572), in Léon Menard, Histoire de la ville de, Nîmes (ed. Rediva:, 1989, 1st ed. 1750), t. 5, 62. x AM Nyons, BB 5, fol. 32 vo sq. xi AM Chalon-sur-Saône, BB 5, fol. 208. xii AD Lot et Garonne, E SUP 2386 (AM Casteljaloux, BB 1). xiii AM Millau, CC 42, 2e. xiv AM Millau, CC 42, 2e inv., non numérotée. xv O. Christin, “Amis, frères et concitoyens. Ceux qui refusèrent la Saint-Barthélemy (1572)”, Cahiers de la Villa Gillet, 11 ( 2000): 71–94 (The original document is preserved in the Archives Nationales, TT 268 (1), fol. 169 sq.). xvi Jean-Paul Chabrol, La Cévenne au village. Barre des Cévennes sous l’Ancien régime: 1560–1830 (Aix-en-Provence: 1983), 182–183.
ONE TOWN, TWO FAITHS: UNITY AND EXCLUSION DURING THE FRENCH RELIGIOUS WARS Penny Roberts Sixteenth-century France might not seem like the most promising context for an exploration of the dynamics of multiconfessionalism. The French religious wars were among the most bloody and hardfought conflicts of the era and were characterised more by division and confrontation than by harmony and coexistence. That said, recent studies have suggested that, in the interests of stability and security, substantial efforts were made at both a central and a local level to establish some form of modus vivendi between the faiths.1 Nevertheless, major obstacles still remained and were to pose a formidable challenge to the peace-making measures employed by royal commissioners and local officials alike throughout the kingdom. Not least of these was the sheer variety and complexity of local circumstances and the necessity for negotiation and mediation between different interest groups. Achieving parity of provision on a nationwide scale, such that both faiths were able to practice their worship on equal terms, was an impossible task. The provincially-minded nature of the French polity weakened royal efforts to establish uniformity in the day-to-day practicalities of religious coexistence within communities. As Ben Kaplan has remarked, “Looser state structures, like those of the empire and confederation, could accommodate multiconfessionalism more easily” than could centralized monarchies, such as France.2 Above all, such tensions played out in an urban context, for it was in the towns of France that the majority of the Protestant or Huguenot population was concentrated. Within some of these communities, Huguenots were able to form a substantial enough minority to assert
1 Olivier Christin, “La coexistence confessionnelle, 1563–1567,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français (1995): 483–504; Jérémie Foa, “Making Peace: the Commissions for Enforcing the Pacification Edicts in the Reign of Charles IX (1560–1574),” French History, 18 (2004): 256–74; Penny Roberts, “Royal Authority and Justice during the French Religious Wars,” Past and Present, 184 (2004): 3–32. 2 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge MA: 2007), 232.
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themselves and, so, might be perceived to pose a threat to public order. Thus, the “one town, two faiths” of my title is not just a play on the ancien régime aphorism “one king, one law, one faith”, but a reference to the strain of upholding urban unity in the face of confessional division. It therefore reflects the situation in which the ruling elites of many French towns found themselves during the wars, struggling to maintain the peace which, as a result of religious tensions, the actions of inhabitants of both faiths threatened to disrupt. At the same time, royal authorities put pressure on municipal officials to reconcile local differences. Despite the controversy it generated, the promotion of confessional harmony was a policy pursued by the crown from early in the wars. The practical measures designed to achieve this end would, however, prove controversial and shall be the focus here. Special commissioners were sent to the provinces to implement the edicts as well as to resolve resulting disputes in situ.3 As tensions increased, so the conditions of such provision became increasingly circumscribed and difficult to enforce. Partly, this was due to the fact that the crown never envisaged toleration as anything other than a temporary solution to an intractable problem. This was explicitly stated in the Edict of January and in subsequent legislation, “in order to maintain our subjects in peace and concord, until God permits us to reunite and return them to the same fold”.4 The ultimate goal was the restoration of religious, specifically Catholic, unity. Although toleration was viewed in the 16th century in this restrictive and conditional way, its promotion by the monarchy was nevertheless contentious.5 It was embodied in a series of royal edicts, legislative pronouncements produced at intervals prior to as well as throughout the wars, which sought to resolve the confessional conflicts within the kingdom.6 In order to enforce the required measures, while attempting not to enflame local tensions, the authorities had to tread warily. The 3 On their deployment, see Foa, “Making Peace” and Roberts, “Royal Authority and Justice”. 4 http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/editsdepacification/edit1.php. Also in André Stegmann (ed.), Édits des guerres de religion (Paris: 1979), 10. 5 On contemporary understandings of toleration, see Mario Turchetti, “Religious Concord and Political Tolerance,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 22 (1991): 15–25; William H. Huseman, “The Expression of the Idea of Toleration in French during the Sixteenth Century,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 15 (1984): 293–310. 6 Most notably in the early 1560s; then in 1563, 1568, 1570, 1576, 1577, 1579, 1580, and 1598—the so-called edicts of pacification. See Stegmann, Édits. Full texts of the edicts can be located at: http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/editsdepacification/
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importance of local concerns and sensitivities had to be gauged, such as how each faith might be enabled to carry out its devotions without causing offence to the other, or how the retention or surrender of weaponry on either side might be negotiated. The distribution of space in a 16th-century town, its outer limits demarcated by perimeter walls, heightened tensions at vital thresholds and meeting points, such as street corners, public squares, and especially at the town gates. In order for confrontations between the faiths to be avoided, such practical and physical constraints as well as strategic considerations needed to be taken into account. At the same time, they served to limit the effectiveness of the edicts as well as the room for maneuver of those charged with enforcing them. In particular, the provision after 1562 of places where the Reformed minority might worship was vehemently contested.7 The outcome in most cases was not truly biconfessional since, unlike for Catholic devotions, a number of restrictions were placed by the crown on where and when Reformed worship was allowed. In addition, as a result of local Catholic opposition, the sites provided were often increasingly remote from the community to which they were allocated. The provision of separate cemeteries for the Huguenot dead further cemented the physical and symbolic separation of the religious minority from the wider community.8 Yet, neither did royal policy equate to segregation, since no prohibition was placed on where Huguenots might live within a locality. Nevertheless, neighborly relations could become tense; the carrying of arms was sometimes deemed necessary during a time of war, but increased suspicion on both sides of the other’s intentions. Thus, despite concession and compromise, against a backdrop of civil strife and contested rights, the development of multiconfessionalism in France would be a fraught and protracted process. Tellingly, the monarchy itself and the city of Paris were excluded from the provision of Reformed worship, which was forbidden within
7 The Edict of January 1562, issued just a few months before the outbreak of war, was the first to allow freedom of worship; specific sites were not designated until the end of the first war in 1563. For more on this issue, see Penny Roberts, “The Most Crucial Battle of the Wars of Religion? The Conflict over Sites for Reformed Worship in Sixteenth-Century France,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 89 (1998): 247–67. 8 Penny Roberts, “Contesting Sacred Space: Burial Disputes in Sixteenth-Century France” in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: 2000), 131–48.
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two leagues of wherever the court was residing and from the environs of the kingdom’s capital.9 Furthermore, tense and sometimes violent confrontations, mutual recrimination, and distrust between the faiths in many communities were not conducive to declarations of amity and reconciliation. Nevertheless, in the interests of keeping the public peace, the authorities were mindful of the need to secure undertakings from both sides that they would refrain from internecine hostilities. Consent was achieved by appealing to notions of obedience and loyalty to the monarchy, whose support was vital to further the cause of either faith, as well as to the “common good” or bien publique of the community as a whole. The monarch was designated “king of all”, underlining the responsibility of both faiths to observe his authority.10 Demonstrably, in a confessionally-divided Europe, the allegiance of religious minorities to those who ruled over them could often be called into question. Less often recognised, loyalty to the community in which one resided was considered equally vital and would prove to be a much-disputed battleground between Huguenot and Catholic, as demonstrated in claim and counter-claim in many localities throughout the religious wars. In such circumstances, suspicion and distrust were easily generated on both sides, largely focused around the provision of, and obstacles to, both faiths’ ability to carry out their devotions in peace. As a result, there was tension between the royal emphasis on the need for unity to hold the kingdom together, predicated on the obligation to provide places of worship for both faiths, and the response of local communities when faced with the practicalities of enforcing coexistence. Divided beliefs were equated with divided loyalties that might disrupt the ties which bound the community together, such as parochial responsibilities, and might even lead to betrayal of the town to external forces. Maintenance of the peace was a vital consideration for the authorities in upholding an orderly urban community. As a result, despite fierce confessional division and outbursts of popular violence, there were attempts in a number of French towns to establish “friendship pacts”
9 Bibliothèque Nationale de France [hereafter BNF], Imprimés, F 46827, no. 11 (24 June 1564): “this worship will cease for the time that we remain there. And indeed a little after”. The exclusion zone around Paris fluctuated in size, but even in 1576, when worship was otherwise unrestricted, it was set at two leagues. 10 A phrase used in Lettres de Catherine des Médicis, H. de La Ferrière and B. de Puchesse (eds.), 10 vols. (Paris: 1880–1943), iii, 167–8 (July/Aug.1568).
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between the faiths during the wars.11 Even where no formal provision was made, many communities were predisposed to hope that the faiths could live peacefully alongside one another in the interests of the common good. It was when the interests of the individual faith cut across these communal solidarities that trouble flared up, suspicion returned, offence was given, and exclusion was reinforced. Yet, no matter how often and how sincerely oaths were taken and declarations made for the faiths to live amicably and peacefully together in French towns, the practical provision of worship undermined this harmonious facade. The presence of Huguenots and notions of confessional coexistence were accepted, but Reformed services were generally excluded from the intramural community, and often even from the town suburbs. Threats to prevailing peace and unity were cited to argue that only the distancing of worship would defuse the tensions that such open displays of the Reformed faith invariably ignited. In Nantes, Catholic remonstrances highlighted the “danger of ruining the town, its trade and commerce” if services were allowed that attracted foreigners and others into the town.12 Further disruption was caused by the public singing of psalms “day and night”, assaults on Catholic clergy, and the “outraging and offending” of those guarding the city gate nearest the designated site of worship. Thus, in order to avoid such risks to public order, security, and economic prosperity, services should be removed to “the suburbs of another town” six to seven leagues away. This assessment was vehemently challenged by Protestant inhabitants, who claimed that local trade had benefitted from their presence, and distancing a site was far more disruptive, resulting in “disturbances and assaults”.13 Above all, a distinction was made here between the officially-sanctioned toleration of another faith on the one hand, and of the destabilising effect of its practices on the public peace on the other. Thus, while the ideal of unity was upheld by royal officials, representatives of either faith, or the collective authorities and inhabitants of a town, it was also used to promote one side’s interests over those of its opponents. The resulting tensions between the desire for social unity and communal harmony and the impact of confessional
11 12 13
See Christin, “La coexistence confessionnelle” and Foa’s essay in this volume. BNF, Manuscrits français [hereafter MS fr] 15581, fols. 335–41. BNF, MS fr 15581, fols. 373–4.
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division in French towns were characteristic of the religious wars. As the conflict developed, the seizure of towns by forces on either side, but more particularly by the Huguenot minority during the first and second wars, as well as the mistreatment suffered during war-time, including harassment, intimidation, and acts of violence, made the faiths extremely wary of one another’s intentions despite declarations of peace. The authorities sought to reconcile the faiths to one another through proper application of the law, embodied in royal justice.14 The more prescriptive the legislation, however, the more it reinforced rather than reduced existing divisions, arguably promoting sectarian division rather than harmonious coexistence. While all could agree that maintenance of the peace was vital, the practical concessions that were invoked to achieve this end proved controversial. Municipal officials were caught between the pressure to enforce royal declarations and the forceful sensibilities of the local inhabitants. This highlights the fundamental tension between the interests of the majority and the accommodation of the needs of a minority. Despite appeals to Christian unity, social exclusion was often the end result. In her article “The Sacred and the Body Social”, Natalie Davis examined Catholic and Huguenot uses of space in 16th-century Lyon through, as she puts it, “social interaction within the town walls”, emphasizing the faiths’ “differing interpretations of urban space, time and community”.15 More recently, Jérémie Foa and Andrew Spicer have explored similar themes in the conflicting use of urban space.16 While Foa focuses on the spatial exclusion of the Huguenot minority within urban communities, Spicer demonstrates how Catholics reasserted their control of urban space in Orléans. In Lyon, Davis argues, “Catholic space was full of special places and sacred spots”, intensified by Protestant iconoclastic purging as the town was reordered following the successful Protestant coup in 1562, while Spicer asserts that “the Reformers dismissed the idea that any place could be more holy than another”.17 In Lyon and Orléans, we have towns where each faith
14
Roberts, “Royal Authority and Justice”. Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon,” Past and Present, 90 (1981): 40–70, quotations, 42, 52. 16 Jérémie Foa, “An Unequal Apportionment: the Conflict over Space between Protestants and Catholics at the Beginning of the Wars of Religion,” French History, 20 (2006): 369–86; Andrew Spicer, “(Re)Building the Sacred Landscape: Orléans, 1560–1610,” French History, 21 (2007): 247–68. 17 Davis, “The Sacred,” 52; Spicer, “(Re)Building,” 248. 15
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had a period of dominance so that their different approaches can be easily contrasted; such a comparison is more difficult when dealing with the more usual situation of a marginalized minority that was never able to assert its position except in reaction to Catholic hegemony. Confessional relations are thus more often viewed through the lens of direct clashes between Protestant and Catholic inhabitants than through everyday attempts at coexistence, however fraught. Religious devotions, such as Catholic processions, have long been recognised as a particular flashpoint for conflict between the faiths in French towns. For Davis, Catholic processions traditionally promoted unity of space, while during the religious wars, as Foa remarks, “processions took on a sectarian and polemical significance”, and for Spicer, “also served as a means to purify the city from the violation of the ritual landscape by the Huguenots”.18 Meanwhile, other historians have discussed similar causes of confessional conflict over the use of communal space, specifically in relation to burial and cemetery disputes, during both the 16th and 17th centuries.19 The allocation of the site of les Terreaux in Lyon not only offended religious sensibilities, but was held to have been “usurped” from the community, a claim refuted by local Huguenots.20 Keith Luria’s emphasis on the construction, transgression, and negotiation of confessional boundaries is instructive when considering the most contentious issues.21 In particular, a pivotal role was played by the location of Reformed worship in promoting a sense of Huguenot exclusion, as well as a very real physical distancing of their devotions.22 The prohibition of Reformed worship within town walls and at night, established prior to the wars in the January edict of 1562 and upheld thereafter, had enormous symbolic value as well as practical implications. While Huguenots could reside within urban communities and were not to be molested for matters of conscience or private prayer within their homes, for the more public acts of collective worship and
18
Foa, “Unequal apportionment,” 380; Spicer, “(Re)Building,” 262. Keith Luria, “Separated by Death? Burials, Cemeteries, and Confessional Boundaries in Seventeenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies, 24 (2001): 185–22; Roberts, “Contesting Sacred Space”. 20 Archives Municipales de [hereafter AM] Lyon, GG 78, no. 21, i, fol. 3v (Jan. 1572). 21 Keith P. Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in EarlyModern France (Washington, DC: 2005). 22 Roberts, “The Most Crucial Battle”. 19
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reception of the sacraments they were forced out beyond the town gates. This effective expulsion from the town and, therefore, from the community made them vulnerable to attack, at the gates themselves or elsewhere on their journey to and from services. In Dijon, for instance, in March 1564, local Huguenots complained that every week, “almost ordinarily on the way out and return, they have been insulted and threatened by several gatekeepers and their supporters”.23 It was all too easy for opponents to lie in wait at the gate giving access to the route to the designated site at the customary time when the Huguenots departed or returned. They were thus forced to run the gauntlet of intimidation and possible assault. As a result, the shift from a clandestine often underground existence to public and legal recognition of the Huguenots’ right to worship, contrary to expectations, in many places restricted rather than improved the provision of Reformed services. Huguenots, who had previously worshipped in each other’s houses, in public open spaces or buildings within towns, or even in local churches, were forced to attend services at designated sites that were far less convenient and accessible. In contrast, Catholic access to churches was safeguarded and unrestricted. In those towns where the Reformed represented the majority faith, such as at La Rochelle, there were attempts by the Huguenots to obstruct Catholic provision, but their appeals fell largely on deaf ears. Furthermore, attempts to retain the use of ecclesiastical buildings were largely unsuccessful, except in the short term in towns such as Grenoble and Valence. The provocative use of bells to announce services was also prohibited in royal legislation against “using churches, bells and other religious items at Huguenot services”.24 Meanwhile, the new measures restricting Reformed worship handed local Catholic inhabitants the grounds for opposing nearby sites, on the basis that they would be disruptive of local peace and order, or threatened regional or even national security. The frequent clashes that had arisen in the past as a result of the faiths worshipping in close proximity to one another could be easily cited. One such was the notorious incident in the parish of Saint-Médard in a Parisian suburb in December 1561, which was said to have been sparked off by the ringing of bells during
23
AM Dijon, D 63 (8 Mar. 1564). F. A. Isambert, Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, depuis l’an 420, jusqu’à la Revolution de 1789 (Paris: 1829), xiv (1559–1589), 228 (7 Sept. 1564). 24
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a Protestant sermon.25 It resulted in a violent confrontation between Catholic and Huguenot congregations, some fatalities, and mutual accusations of blame. Such episodes served to discourage any change of heart in royal policy when it came to the allocation of extramural sites. This is not to say that Huguenots were secure within the town walls either, as those in Paris found to their cost in August 1572, when the gate of Saint-Germain was closed during the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.26 Violent incidents on the streets and an irregular policy of house arrest during war-time, in communities right across France, also bore witness to Huguenot vulnerability. Even at less fraught times, their presence could provoke resentment, as urban streets were easily permeated by the sights, sounds, and smells emanating from domestic activities. When these transgressed religious prohibitions and custom regarding when one could work, how one should act, what one could eat, and what one should say, violence could ensue. The ebb and flow of the conflict must have increased Huguenot fears of exposure and intimidation as they stepped out onto the streets or even as they sat within their homes with the external noise of holy day processions and festivities passing by. Their refusal to participate in the usual parochial obligations, such as the decoration of their houses on holidays or contributions to parish-related collections or observances, must have hit a nerve with their Catholic neighbors. Unsurprisingly, the “body of believers” was fractured by such actions.27 Furthermore, the leaving of the town to attend services would have seemed like a public act of defiance and rejection of those communal bonds which urban inhabitants held dear. Rather than heading to their parish church, where those bonds of community were reinforced, Huguenots set out for the gates that severed them; an action that made it awkward for the customary bonds to be renewed on their return. It was through the town gates, too, that they would leave and return during periods of temporary exile with each declaration of war or subsequent peace, underlining their exclusion. What would have reinforced still further the Huguenot sense of ostracization and 25 For accounts in English of the incident, see David Potter (ed.), The French Wars of Religion: Selected Documents (Basingstoke: 1997), 41–2. 26 For much more on the physical and symbolic significance of urban walls, see Michael Wolfe, Walled Towns and the Shaping of France: From the Medieval to the Early Modern Era (Basingstoke: 2009). 27 This phrase is taken from Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge, UK: 1995), 2.
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marginalization was that they were forced to worship in peripheral, often rural areas on the edge of the locality, far away from the heart of their community. The discourse of remoteness and vulnerability dominated their representations to the crown in an effort to have unpalatable decisions overturned. Likewise, Catholics focused on the danger that Huguenot activities posed to the integrity and security of the community, thereby justifying the need to distance and contain them. In such circumstances, no wonder it was hard for either faith to believe that the bonds of unity, amity, and peace which the crown encouraged were being effectively upheld and demonstrated by the other side. The convenience and accessibility of the sites provided was the particular focus of Huguenot petitions to the crown and its representatives. Requests most often stipulated that the faithful, both young and old, should, ideally, be able to “conveniently go and come back in a morning” (as requested at Poitiers) or, at least, be granted a site “to which they can go and come back in a day” (as demanded at Bordeaux and Lyon).28 In particular, fears were expressed about the dangers posed to the health of new-borns as they were carried to far-flung sites for baptism. The terrain and climate, of both the journey and the location, also had to be deemed suitable. Forests, marshes, mountains, and rivers all posed physical barriers and practical limitations to the accessibility of sites. The hostility of the inhabitants as well as the risk of attack en route and, in particular, of violence when leaving or entering the town, was carefully assessed and scrutinized. At Tours, having initially secured a site only a league away in the town suburbs, the official designation in 1563 was deemed unsuitable by local Huguenots, because it was on ecclesiastical land, took more than an hour to reach by foot, and en route they had to pass through “several harbors, marshes, rivers and other dangerous places”.29 Even another site two leagues to the west they described as “highly inappropriate, exposed to sun and rain causing sickness and other inconveniences”,
28 On Poitiers, BNF, MS fr 18156, fols. 15r, 35r (Feb.–Mar. 1564); on Bordeaux, BNF, MS fr 15881, fol. 294r (1565); AM Bordeaux, GG 983a, no. 21 (Sept. 1564); on Lyon: AM Lyon, GG 78, no. 34 (Oct. 1579?). 29 David Nicholls, “Protestants, Catholics and Magistrates in Tours, 1562–1572: the Making of a Catholic City during the Religious Wars,” French History: 8 (1994): 19, n. 15.
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and requested the use of the local village hall instead.30 In addition, the route there involved crossing a major bridge through a Catholic suburb where they had been attacked before and also lay on a dangerous wooded route. After fighting broke out between the faiths at the site in January 1566, the authorities at Tours locked the gates and the returning Huguenots were forced to spend the night outside the town.31 No clearer demonstration of their exclusion from the community, justified on the grounds of protecting the interests of upholding public order, could be given. Unsurprisingly, Huguenot concerns about access commonly focused on the threat of violence as they journeyed to external sites. At Orléans, they requested that the governor, “provide them with an appropriate and nearby site for worship where they will not be attacked”.32 They mentioned a couple of possible locations in the suburbs that would suit and furthermore “contain everyone in peace”, as well as another that would prove “extremely dangerous because of the sailors as well as the vine-growers and millers who are very seditious”. Conscious of the obstruction they had already faced, the Huguenots also pleaded that guards be removed from the city gates and that these be left open on Sundays and holidays to allow free passage for the faithful. Reported attacks on Huguenots and their children, as they went to and from services, were common, almost routine.33 Yet, Catholics clearly saw the town gates as points of vulnerability too, as in the case discussed earlier of the supposed Huguenot intimidation of the gatekeepers at Nantes. At Meaux, the Catholic inhabitants opposed a request by local Huguenots to restore the drawbridge that separated the town from a nearby suburb, arguing that the gates were open from early morning until late at night and the drawbridge kept down, so that there was no need for such additional provision.34 More generally, the positioning of a town’s gates might make it more vulnerable to external attack, and suitable precautions had to be taken to guard against such an
30 Bibliothèque Municipale [hereafter BM] d’Angers, MS 997, no. 7 (1564/65); cf. Nicholls, “Protestants, Catholics” on the unsuitability of the site being “exposed to rain and wind”, 24. 31 Nicholls, “Protestants, Catholics,” 27–8. 32 BNF, MS fr 3189, fol. 8 (1563/64?). 33 For some examples from Provence, see Archives Départementales des Bouchesdu-Rhône (annexe), B 3328, fols. 718v–20 (1562); also B 3329, fols. 390v–3r (May 1565). 34 BNF, MS fr 18156, fol. 71v (Apr. 1564).
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eventuality. At Castres, in 1569, while some existing gates were closed for strategic reasons, a new one was opened up; whereas during peacetime this so-called “gate of troubles”—suggesting its immediate association with the religious wars, referred to as “the troubles”—was walled up and the others re-opened.35 Such examples serve as a reminder that troop movements and other military activities might place towns in the affected region on a state of alert, which was unlikely to improve confessional relations or to reduce concerns about internal subversion. Indeed, Catholic opposition to sites frequently focused on a history of tension and unrest as well as seditious activity by local Huguenots. It was argued, therefore, that allowing their services ran contrary to the ideals of unity and order. At Nantes, it was declared that if Reformed worship was allowed in the town there would be “sedition” and “division”.36 By 1565, such a prospect would be “damaging to the king and public interest”, causing sedition and scandal.37 In Troyes, in April 1563, a survey was conducted to gauge opposition to the location of Reformed services in the town’s suburbs. The more vocal of the inhabitants declared that the services “would divide the town”, or commented that “the services hitherto” had led to “great disturbances”.38 Some expanded on these fears with reference to the wider impact on the people and even the kingdom, arguing that the services caused “great ruin to the people” and were contrary to “the peace and tranquillity of the realm”.39 Similarly at Dijon, Huguenot behaviour was deemed “prejudicial to the king, the town and (the) governorship, and consequently the entire kingdom”. By contrast, at Meulan near Paris, the authorities took a determinedly local view of the situation. They declared the inhabitants “peaceful and unified in the old religion”, and that toleration of the Huguenots “would only bring division, disrupting the unity and peace between the inhabitants”.40 Thus, even if the rest of the kingdom was embracing biconfessionalism, a case was made for its rejection in this particular locality. Such framing of the
35 See Jean Faurin, Journal de Faurin sur les guerres de Castres in Pièces fugitives pour servir à l’histoire de France (Paris: 1759), 53. 36 BNF, MS fr 15879, fol. 6r (Jan. 1563); Huguenots in Rennes had been refused a site in 1561 because of the risk of “trouble and popular unrest”, cf. 15875, fols. 287, 289. 37 BNF, MS fr 15881, fols. 409–10. 38 AM Troyes, Boutiot BB 14, 1er liasse, no. 24, fols. 3, 53. 39 Ibid., fol. 50. 40 BNF, Collection du Vexin, MS 26, fol. 156r.
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problem according to local interests continually plagued the attempts of royal officials to introduce a nationwide settlement that all could or would be prepared to accept. Concerns about national security restricted the provision of sites still further, and provided additional arguments for those looking to remove Reformed worship from their locality. Frontier towns (a contested designation, although defined as guarded by a governor and soldiers) as well as those on a strategic route (again debatable) or with a sovereign court or parlement (more clear-cut) were excluded as potential sites.41 Once secured, this exclusion was extended beyond the town walls to the suburbs and any other nearby settlements which might be deemed contiguous, setting up another basis for many a challenge. Reformed worship was also banned from lands belonging to the Catholic Church and the crown (a more substantial constraint). As the wars progressed, precedent had some standing, where public worship could be proven on a certain date (again much disputed) or provided for by an earlier commission. It is not quite true to say that any location was “up for grabs”, but both faiths made the most of official prescriptions to assert and invent claims as well as to oppose them. The suitability of a given site was a matter of perspective and dominated the correspondence between the crown and those responsible for the edicts’ enforcement. In response to the appeal of the Catholics of Bayeux against the provision of Reformed worship in the town’s suburbs, the local governor was directed by the king to allocate another site “convenient” for the Huguenots, but not “inconvenient” for local Catholics.42 Such directives were more easily issued than met. It is evident that the Huguenot minority were almost wholly dependent on the goodwill of the crown for securing the designation and subsequent establishment of a site. This becomes clear in the case of Metz, a vital strategic stronghold on France’s eastern border with the Empire. In 1569, the Huguenots of Metz provided a robust defence of their claims to a site of worship in the town. First, they pointed out that a place had been granted eight years or so before by royal
41 Recueil de pièces relatives aux troubles civils de 1562–1564 (Paris: 1564). On disputes about frontier status, see Penny Roberts, “Huguenot conspiracies, real and imagined, in sixteenth-century France” in Barry Coward and Julian Swann (eds.), Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution (Aldershot: 2004), 55–69. 42 BNF, MS fr 15546, fol. 260r (June 1568).
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commission. Although it had been less than they had wanted, they had accepted it “in the hope that after having provided sufficient proof of their fidelity, modesty and obedience, your majesty would better accommodate them”.43 Now they hoped that he would “not only continue the freedom and favour which they have so long and so peacefully enjoyed under your protection sire, but also after such a long period of patience grant them some greater grace and favour”. They also wished to counter the attempts of their Catholic opponents to slander them and give grounds for the removal of their temple, although “not a single one of them can say that they have been assaulted by word or deed, neither against them nor their property”. Further underlining Metz’s biconfessional credentials, the Huguenots emphasised that the abolition of worship would endanger and chase out Protestant “relations, allies, neighbors and good friends” with whom Catholic citizens had previously socialized “as if all had been of the same religion”, so that “the tranquillity, peace and concord of this town served as an example to all others”. The removal of this harmony, they argued, through the Catholic attack on their practices and the hounding of the king’s most loyal subjects, was “as damaging to your service as to the Republic”. Furthermore, the clergy’s condemnation of their doctrine and their claim that their imperial neighbors were horrified by it was contrary to royal acceptance of the confession of faith and the imperial princes’ approval of its practice in the villages of the region. Metz’s peculiar position on the imperial border made the need for the accommodation of both faiths both more conspicuous and more pressing. It is unsurprising that local Protestants looked to the Empire for support. Yet, despite repeated emphasis on their obedience, unfulfilled royal promises, and the calumnies of their opponents, not only did the Huguenots of Metz receive no further favour from the king, but their existing temple was demolished by royal order the following week.44 By contrast, the much shorter and blunter appeal from the clergy of the town, protesting that the crown had breached an earlier agreement to exempt the town from Reformed worship, was accepted.45 The ebb and flow of war between the crown and the Huguenots, 1569 being a year of open conflict, as well as making the 43
Calendar of State Papers Foreign [hereafter CSPF], 70/106, fols. 72–3 (30 Mar. 1569). 44 CSPF, 70/106, fol. 93; BNF, MS fr 3188, fols. 38–9 (both 6 Apr. 1569). 45 CSPF, 70/106, fols. 48–50 (19 Mar. 1569).
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king less well-disposed to their requests, disrupted the continuity of provision of sites of worship and, subsequently, the cause of multiconfessionalism in France. Another issue which increased rather than reduced tension and division between the faiths, and undermined efforts to establish effective coexistence, was that of disarmament. It was difficult for either side to feel safe or secure when fearful about the consequences of weapons being carried by their opponents. A principal Catholic anxiety, again concerned with public order and security, was to disarm those attending Reformed services. Unsurprisingly, a right to bear arms beyond the town walls was stoutly defended by Huguenots, who were fearful of being rendered vulnerable to attack as they travelled to and fro. At Lyon they pleaded that it was the danger and distance of the route they had to take that forced them to carry weapons to services solely for the purposes of self-defence.46 Yet, Catholics were equally nervous about the presence of armed groups in close proximity to their town. In 1570, the municipal authorities in Dijon were anxious about those of the “new opinion leaving town in troops with swords and daggers and going to the suburbs . . . (to) hold assemblies and dangerous services”.47 Whether or not the other faith continued to be armed was to prove a contentious issue throughout the wars, redolent of the distrust felt on both sides. From the point of view of the royal authorities it was better that no-one bore weapons, so as to reduce the likelihood of violent clashes, and the crown produced regular legislation to this effect. In 1564, for instance, it forbade “everyone from carrying arquebuses, pistols, or guns, nor other firearms, on pain of confiscation of their weapons and horses”.48 At other times, there were prohibitions on the carrying of arms and wandering the streets at night, and even on the sale and purchase of weaponry.49 In practice, however, there was much resistance to disarmament unless it was first, or even only, carried out by the other side. Synchronization of the process might have been the ideal solution, as the Protestant peace negotiator Calignon proposed in 1581, but it was hard
46
AM Lyon, GG 78, no. 21, iv, fol. 3r (May 1572). AM Dijon, B 207, fols. 62v–3r (Sept. 1570). 48 BNF, Imprimés, F 46826, no. 7 (28 Jan. 1564). 49 BM de Lyon, 354292, ordinances by the king and governor Vieilleville (Feb. & Apr. 1564); BNF, MS fr 17832, fol. 71r (May 1564), against sale of weapons in Troyes. 47
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to achieve.50 Those seeking to evade observation of the royal directives justified exemption on a number of grounds. For instance, a case was frequently made for the security needs of the (usually majority Catholic) population because of local tensions or, once again, proximity to a frontier. Both arguments were deployed in Burgundy in 1563, noting the still unstable situation at Lyon to the south, and that in Beaune “several townspeople, mostly craftsmen, carry daggers and clubs as usual” due to its frontier status.51 By 1568, with the renewal of war threatening, the governor complained that the fact that most Burgundian towns had disarmed successfully now left them “prey to our former enemies”.52 In 1564, Marseille and Toulon on the south coast had protested to the crown, which admitted that a mistake had been made in ordering them to disarm since they were frontier towns, but it stated that arms were “to be used in cases of necessity against the invasions and incursions of enemies and not otherwise”.53 In Bayonne, by contrast, it was suggested that arming the inhabitants was “more dangerous in frontier towns than elsewhere”.54 Meanwhile, in the Loire valley towns of Tours, Amboise, Blois, and Orléans, the regular alarms raised as a result of the amassing of Huguenots in the region was used to counter the order to disarm in 1568.55 At Tours, the authorities reported to the king that the inhabitants were “so suspicious of their Huguenot citizens that they would not like them yet to enter nor return until things are a little more assured than we see them”, and that those who lived in the populous suburb through which they would have to pass on their way to services found “such manner of people extremely odious”.56 During the religious wars, both faiths complained about the other’s failure to disarm and warned the crown of the danger that would result from such a state of affairs. At the same time, a case was often made for why arms should be retained by their coreligionists. At Blois, in the autumn of 1563, Huguenot claims “in their accustomed manner” that disarming would leave them exposed were dismissed. Instead, they
50
BNF, MS fr 4047, fols. 122v–3r. BNF, MS fr 17832, fol. 3v (May 1563); 4048, fols. 77–8 (Sept. 1563); 4632, fol. 32r (Oct. 1563). 52 BNF, Ms fr 15547, fol. 13 (July 1568). 53 BNF, MS fr 15879, fols. 134–5 (Mar. 1564); 15880, fol. 228r (Aug. 1564). 54 BNF, MS fr 15880, fols. 404–5r (Dec. 1564). 55 BNF, MS fr 15546, fols. 95–7, 99–100, 107r, 147r, 180–2 (May/June 1568). 56 BNF, MS fr 15546, fols. 99–100r, 233–4 (May–June, 1568). 51
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were counter-accused of being the worst offenders, since they openly carried weapons in the countryside and conducted armed assemblies, whereas the town-hall’s inventory revealed Catholic compliance with royal directives on disarmament.57 A similar situation was described at Angoulême, but the general picture was one of universal defiance of such orders.58 Resistance even came from officials themselves, such as the parlementaires and municipality of Bordeaux, who claimed that they had exemption (as was the case for sword nobles).59 Here and elsewhere, chateaux (whether inside or outside a town) were sometimes viewed as safer holding-places for weaponry than the town-hall, handing the responsibility for their safe-keeping to local governors rather than to the (perhaps less dependable) municipality. For instance, in the Nivernais, it was the Huguenots’ turn to accuse their Catholic neighbors of failing to comply with the royal directive to disarm, while all weaponry in the region was to be taken to the chateau, to which the royal bailli had the key.60 The presence of armed garrisons led to similar concerns among Huguenots regarding their vulnerability to intimidation and even assault. Those at Dieppe reported being terrorized by members of its garrison and requested that a company be raised to guard the town instead.61 The Catholics of Lectoure in Languedoc, however, felt equally threatened by the activities of the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre, and his followers in the region, including the enemy garrisons maintained at their expense.62 In 1565, a request was sent to the governor that arms be restored to loyal citizens and subjects in the Bordeaux region “to avoid the dangers of surprise”, and once a search had been made by those “not suspected of sedition”, those identified as suspect were to be disarmed and expelled.63 In line with other petitions to the crown, a distinction was almost certainly being made here between “loyal” Catholics and “disloyal” Huguenots. Reference was made to those bearing arms against the king, underlining the impact of the ongoing conflict on
57
BNF, MS fr 15878, fols. 151–60, 181–93r (Oct. 1563). BNF, MS fr 15878, fols. 96–7 (Aug. 1563), 116 (Châtellerault in Poitou). 59 BNF, MS fr 15878, fols. 239–40r (Nov. 1563), 287–9r; and 15880, fol. 129r (May 1564), on continuing resistance in Bordeaux. 60 BNF, MS fr 15878, fol. 296r; 15879, fol. 26 (Jan. 1564), on continuing difficulties with disarmament at Nevers. 61 BNF, MS fr 15548, fols. 175, 177 (1568). 62 BNF, MS fr 15564, fols. 87–89r (1581). 63 BNF, MS fr 15881, fol. 320r. 58
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perceptions of community solidarity, breeding instead mutual suspicion and hostility. During the 1560s in particular, there were numerous attempts by the Huguenots to seize the major towns of the kingdom, beginning with the prince of Condé’s capture of Orléans in April 1562. Thus, references to “those who have carried arms at Orléans and elsewhere” or “against the king” became shorthand for Huguenot traitors. At Laon in Picardy, in 1568, there was concern not only about assemblies in arms being held around the town and the presence of nearby Protestant strongholds, but also about the carrying of weapons within the town by the approximately 100 Huguenots who lived there and had fought against the king.64 Similarly, at Loriol in Dauphiné, the authorities argued that the prohibition of arms following the peace of 1570 should be delayed until the “new religion” had been disarmed and removed from the places in the province that they had “usurped”.65 The implication was, since their actions had been illegitimate, that the Huguenots had forfeited their opportunity to benefit from crown protection. In the province of Burgundy, it was claimed in 1568 that armed Huguenots were carrying out “services, movements and negotiations as much or more than they ever did”.66 Elsewhere, reports came in of both the successful disarming of Huguenots as they returned through town gates, taking weapons “which are given back to them when they leave to go out to the countryside”, and the unsuccessful disarming, which meant that they were refused entry, for instance at Nantes, when returning from exile after the second war.67 The careful regulation of the distribution of arms was one measure by which tensions might be avoided, but it could be a risky strategy if either side chose not to comply with the authorities. Yet, the decisions of the officials charged with enforcing royal directives, both external commissioners as well as local officers, could also be viewed with suspicion. Sometimes this was because their confessional sympathies were well known, but at others they were simply accused of returning biased judgments, those with which their accusers did not agree. This was as true of the “covert Huguenots” of the parlement of Bordeaux as of the “principal enemies” of the Huguenots among the councillors of the parlement of
64 65 66 67
BNF, MS fr 15546, fol. 128r (May 1568); 15548, fols. 170–1 (Nov. 1568). BNF, MS fr 15552, fol. 233r (Aug. 1570). BNF, MS fr 15547, fol. 13 (July 1568). BNF, MS fr 15547, fol. 20 (Normandy); 15546, fol. 25 (May 1568, Nantes).
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Toulouse.68 Likewise the sénéchal at Nantes was accused of wanting “to sell the town to the Huguenots”, whereas at Mâcon a “seditious and factious” clerk was held responsible for the most recent surprise of the town.69 A memorandum composed by the Huguenots to the king, in February 1579, argued the case for equitable treatment of the faiths, as “the means to assure the re-establishment of the peace”.70 This was to include “justice equally and well administered” and, in particular, freedom of worship in contrast to the inconsistent and dangerous provision with which the Huguenots were currently faced. Just as the crown argued that its subjects of either faith were obliged to be equally obedient in return for which they would receive royal protection, so the Huguenots asserted that this obedience entitled them to equal treatment with Catholics. Furthermore, they claimed that such inequalities were contrary to the intention of the edicts and that they nurtured rather than eased the conflict. Although certain judicial concessions were granted, including the establishment of special chambers attached to the parlements, which included among their members judges of both faiths, the balance of power still lay with the Catholics. This fundamental inequality between the faiths in France, the inevitable result of the Huguenots’ minority status and dependence on a Catholic crown, lies at the heart of the failure to establish a truly biconfessional community, whether at the local or national level. As a result, Huguenots were frustrated by the lack of progress they made and the many obstacles they faced in achieving recognition for their demands. Catholics too were uncomfortable even with the limited concessions they had to make to their Huguenot neighbors, discouraged by fears about the dangers and disruptions that might result. In different localities, these concerns were grounded in recent experience or reports of violence or sedition coming from other communities, whose example they did not wish to emulate. In order to protect, as they saw it, the wider interests of the majority, local authorities sought to push the minority out, reducing the threat which they posed by locating their activities elsewhere. This figurative expulsion from the community, which nevertheless involved a very physical separation from the rest of the
68 69 70
BNF, MS fr 15550, fol. 87 (Oct. 1569); 15882, fols. 192–6 (July 1566). BNF, MS fr 15879, fol. 58 (Feb. 1564); 15546, fol. 53 (May 1568). LCM, vi, pp. 417–35 (6 Feb.).
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inhabitants, eroded Huguenot goodwill and trust in the concessions they had gained and the willingness of the authorities to uphold them. They were often made to feel more vulnerable to attack than before, sought armed protection to mitigate the situation, and in turn caused further concern to their Catholic counterparts. The resulting anxieties on both sides made a workable state of coexistence difficult, but not impossible, although sudden scares or the return of conflict brought tensions to the fore, as was the case in several communities in the wake of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres.71 One of the few countries in Europe to pursue an officially-sanctioned biconfessional solution to the schism caused by the Reformation, France provides examples of all the difficulties that such an approach might face. The practical arrangements necessary to ensure that the Huguenot minority were able to carry out their devotions in peace were among the most contested issues. The designation of sites for worship established a physical demarcation and separation of confessional groups at the same time as it legitimized coexistence. Their location was crucial for the Huguenot sense of inclusion, or more often exclusion, with regard to their local community. The segregation and separation of the Huguenots through the distancing of sites for worship reflects the concern of many that confessional division would lead to social division. Complete integration was illusory, because so many contemporary aspects of sociability and community were bound up with religious affiliation and practice. Thus, the convenience of a site had to be weighed against the potential for disorder. Urban communities faced a daily struggle over confessional balance and social disruption; unity was highly prized but, in practice, precarious and controversial. An additional concern about the threat to the welfare and safety of the community, which the carrying of weapons inside or outside the town posed, worsened relations between the faiths. Obedience to the crown was upheld, but local authorities did not accept royal directives unconditionally, if they were thought to threaten the public good. Could the coreligionists of their opponents really be trusted, at a time of civil strife or even during peacetime? As a result, the Huguenot minority, while seeking inclusion, often experienced exclusion from, and marginal status within, the urban community. Competitive peti-
71 Philip Benedict, “The Saint Bartholomew’s Massacres in the Provinces,” Historical Journal, 21 (1978): 205–25.
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tioning of the crown and its officials to secure or obstruct concessions exacerbated divisions; the interchangeability of open warfare and declarations of peace complicated the situation further. Attempts to establish neither social unity nor confessional exclusion would ultimately resolve the tensions within communities. Thus, practical issues and simmering resentments provided a significant obstacle to the successful implementation of the royal policy of pacification during the religious wars (and beyond), as well as to the establishment of an untroubled state of multiconfessional harmony in France.
PART FIVE
BRITAIN
MULTICONFESSIONALISM IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN Bernard Capp Multiconfessionalism in Britain has a checkered history that really begins only in the mid-17th century. Monarchs from Elizabeth to Charles I had sought, with varying degrees of success, to mould England into a confessional state, with political authority and public office bound tightly to the Established Church, of which they were successive heads. Catholics faced fierce persecution, as did the tiny groups of radical separatists. This pattern was transformed by the civil war. Oliver Cromwell established an extensive measure of religious freedom, enshrined in the constitution, and though the Restoration in 1660 brought back a compulsory Established Church, monarchs now turned against their predecessors’ strategy. Parliament and the bishops still hoped to forge an exclusive bond between crown and church, but Charles II, James II, and William III all favored a multiconfessional state. Such a structure would free them, they believed, from an unwelcome dependence on the Anglican Church and its political supporters, crystallized from the late 1670s in the new Tory party. They had a variety of motives. None felt any personal commitment to the Anglican Church, with Charles a Catholic sympathiser, James a Catholic convert, and William a Dutch Calvinist. Charles and William both saw toleration as more likely to deliver political stability, while James was desperate to secure a lasting freedom and equality for his co-religionists. After the civil wars monarchs were moreover no longer able to impose their own religious preferences on the nation, as their Tudor predecessors had done. Years of negotiation and confrontation between crown and parliament eventually produced an English settlement that was more multiconfessional than most parliamentarians and churchmen had wanted, if less than the crown, dissenters, and Catholics had hoped.1 Things turned out very differently in Scotland and Ireland, where the issue remained which church could achieve
1 For recent surveys see John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (Harlow: 2000); Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred. Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester: 2006).
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religious and political domination. In Ireland, where most of the population remained firmly Catholic, the Episcopalian church emerged triumphant, despite Catholic interludes in the 1640s and 1680s. In Scotland, the Presbyterians lost control to the Episcopalians after the Restoration, but regained it in 1689, with the satisfaction of seeing episcopacy abolished and outlawed. The mid-Tudor world had been very different. Mary Tudor had hoped to eradicate Protestant heresy, and might have succeeded had she lived. Elizabeth, treading cautiously, hoped that in time the entire population would come to accept her new Church, whether from conviction or habit. The oaths of supremacy and uniformity, which all officeholders, clergy, and (from 1571) Members of Parliament were required to take, signalled that government was inseparably tied to the Church of which the queen was supreme governor. The crown reinforced its message by suppressing Catholic services, imposing heavy fines on recusants, and jailing and later executing many Catholic priests and their protectors. Elizabeth was no zealot. Realising at her accession that it would be impracticable and dangerous to sweep all Catholic sympathisers out of public life, she allowed many to continue for years as local magistrates. But she would make no formal concessions to Catholicism, either in the religious or political sphere. Her determination was evident in the long-running marriage negotiations involving Catholic princes of the Habsburg and Valois families. In each case the Habsburg or French negotiators were told bluntly that a marriage treaty would give the queen’s husband no rights whatever to practise the Catholic faith in England, even in private. He and his courtiers would be expected to attend services conducted according to the 1559 prayer-book, conforming at least outwardly and eventually, it was anticipated, converting to the faith of the English church. Predictably, the negotiations all failed.2 It is probable that by the time she died Elizabeth recognised that her dream of religious unity had failed. Missionary priests, arriving from the continent from the later 1570s, brought a new spirit of resolution and Catholic recusancy remained strong among the nobility and, in some areas, the gentry. But with England locked in war with Catholic Spain from the late 1580s, Catholics were viewed as potential
2 Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony. The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: 1996).
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traitors and their chances of securing toleration, let alone formal recognition, remained nil. The first signs of tectonic shift appear with the manoeuvring of James VI of Scotland as he sought to smooth his succession to the English throne. Conscious of the strength of Catholicism among the English elites, and with all the major continental powers still firmly Catholic, James put out a number of feelers in the late 1590s. There were discreet contacts with the papacy, and his queen (Anne of Denmark) hinted that her husband might follow her own example and convert to Rome. To English Catholics James promised that once installed as king he would end their persecution and prosecution. Wishful thinking led Pope Clement VIII to hope that the king was ripe for conversion and English Catholics to hope for formal toleration once he was secure on the throne. Most English Catholics supported his succession and, for a while, joyfully anticipated a new dawn of liberty. For about 18 months James cancelled the collection of recusancy fines, and Catholic priests moved about with relative safety. The queen supported appeals for toleration, and pressed openly for Catholics to be given offices at court and for Prince Henry, the heir-apparent, to be brought up a Catholic. James himself proved far more cautious. While lacking any appetite for persecution, he insisted that Catholics make an outward show of conformity to the Established Church, demanding in effect that they become “church-papists”. Even so, the Catholics’ new boldness and James’s indulgence drew fierce criticism from many bishops and councilors, which soon forced him to change course. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, launched by extremists who had wanted a Catholic state rather than mere toleration, inevitably prompted a further tightening of the laws. In this new climate, there could be no chance of formal toleration, though once the panic had died down Catholics enjoyed relatively lenient treatment, and Catholicism became acceptable, even fashionable, at the royal court.3 Only in the final years of the reign did any possibility resurface of a major shift in policy. Its context was the protracted negotiations for a marriage between Prince Charles, now Prince of Wales, and the Spanish Infanta. The project appealed to James as a chance to balance and perhaps reconcile the warring states of Europe and, he hoped, secure
3 D. H. Willson, King James VI and I (London: 1956), 145–9, 217–42; Coffey, Persecution, 117–21.
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Spanish help towards the restoration of his son-in-law to the Palatinate. Naturally Spain would expect concessions, and in 1622 James went a long way (as he thought) towards meeting them by relaxing the laws against Catholics and releasing imprisoned Catholic priests and laymen. Negotiations dragged on, however, and in 1623 Charles and the royal favourite, Buckingham, made an extraordinary, unannounced visit to Madrid in the hope of cutting through the diplomatic obstacles. In the event, the papacy made its approval of the match conditional on James suspending the laws against Catholics and allowing them to worship freely. Charles, under pressure, agreed in his father’s name to these demands, and promised that within three years a parliament would both confirm the suspension and repeal the anti-Catholic laws. It is highly unlikely that any parliament would have accepted such demands, though in the event Charles did not have to make good his promise. For Spain now demanded further concessions, blocking the marriage until either Catholic toleration had been confirmed by both the privy council and parliament, or James or the prince had converted to Rome. These new demands effectively destroyed the treaty. James had made substantial concessions, including a dispensation that would have given Catholics freedom to worship at home instead of attending their parish church. But he refused to issue a proclamation to that effect, knowing the outcry it would provoke, and instructed that the dispensation would take effect only after the marriage had taken place. Deadlocked, the negotiations petered out. Charles returned to England, welcomed by crowds deliriously happy to find him safe and still Protestant. James assured parliament, when it met early in 1624, that he had never intended more than a temporary relief for Catholics, and the opposition the match had encountered even among his own ministers meant that he could probably have delivered no more even had he wished to do so.4 By the end of 1625 Charles had inherited the crown and declared war on Spain, riding a wave of anti-Spanish feeling. By then he had also acquired a French bride, Henrietta Maria. The French had similarly demanded religious concessions, but were in a weaker bargaining position than Spain had been. Prince Charles had promised a suspi-
4 Roger Lockyer, Buckingham. The Life and Times of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 (Harlow: 1984) 125–65; Calendar of State Papers, Domestic [hereafter CSPD], 1619–23, 436, 448; CSPD 1623–5, 35, 42, 69, 78, 166.
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cious parliament in 1624 that if he ever married a Catholic princess, he would make no concessions to Catholics. James told the French ambassador that as the recusancy laws were effectively asleep, it would be counter-productive to reawaken passions by issuing a public declaration. In the event, James and Charles agreed to a secret article promising to end prosecutions, though there was no question of any formal suspension or repeal of the laws. Even so, James instructed the judges in December 1624 to show favor to accused Catholics, ordered the release of those imprisoned, and forbade new prosecutions, triggering complaints in the 1625 parliament that this de facto toleration was a direct consequence of the French marriage-treaty.5 Although another twist in policy soon brought war with France too, suspicions continued to fester. A Commons committee in February 1629 condemned the “suspension or negligence in execution of the laws against Popery”, and demanded a reversal in government policy.6 Suspicions about the favour Catholics enjoyed at Court and the arrival of a papal envoy in 1636 helped create the atmosphere of religious fear that led to the collapse of royal authority in 1640, triggered by religious upheavals in Scotland. The Reformation in Scotland, a separate state until the union of crowns in 1603, had taken a very different course. Its church had a reformed, Presbyterian structure, over which the bishops exerted only limited control. James VI (James I of England after 1603), eager for greater uniformity between his dominions and to increase his influence over the church, took several steps to strengthen the bishops’ position, and the Articles of Perth (1618), which imposed new liturgical demands, such as kneeling at communion, represented another move in the same direction. In 1637 Charles I pressed further, imposing a more ceremonial liturgy modelled on the English prayer-book. The Scots saw this move as both popish and autocratic and erupted in revolt. In 1638 a general assembly abolished episcopacy, and by 1639 a national covenant had pledged them to erect Presbyterianism throughout Britain. In 1640 a Scottish army invaded England.
5 Lockyer, Buckingham, 198–206, 208–9; Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford: 1979), 154, 209–11, 229–30, 243; CSPD 1623–5, 323, 417, 419. 6 S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: 1906), 79, 82.
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The Scottish rebellion forced Charles to summon parliament in England, and religious passions quickly surfaced. The Root and Branch petition (December 1640), calling for the abolition of episcopacy, complained that the favours Catholics had lately enjoyed had led them to expect “that their superstitious religion will ere long be fully planted in this kingdom again”. The Grand Remonstrance, a year later, went still further. Complaining that Catholics had enjoyed “such exemptions from penal laws as amounted to a toleration”, it accused the king’s evil counsellors of promoting a dangerous “conjunction” between the Arminian (High Church) and Catholic parties, “only it must not yet be called Popery”. The Nineteen Propositions, presented to the king in June 1642 as the basis for a settlement, demanded the strict execution of the laws against all Catholics.7 The Grand Remonstrance marked the emergence too of another religious issue. The collapse of ecclesiastical authority had allowed the tiny separatist churches to emerge from hiding and grow, especially in London. The king’s friends accused parliamentarian leaders of encouraging, or at least allowing, this division within the Church. The Remonstrance firmly rebutted the charge. There was no desire to “let loose the golden reins of discipline and government in the Church”, its authors declared. Far from permitting particular congregations to devise their own forms of worship, they wanted to see strict uniformity enforced throughout the land. That uniformity, it was later resolved, was to be based on the Scottish Presbyterian system. The Solemn League and Covenant, parliament’s alliance with the Scots in 1644, committed both parties to work for the extirpation of popery and prelacy in England and Ireland and the establishment of a godly uniformity in all three kingdoms.8 That goal became the basis for parliament’s negotiating position with the king, as the civil war dragged on. At Uxbridge, in 1644, and Newcastle, in 1645, parliament’s envoys demanded that the king should accept this model for godly reformation and agree to the strict enforcement of the laws against Catholics and to root out heresy and schism.9 As the war entered its final stages, in 1645–6, the debate shifted significantly. It now raged too among the parliamentarians them-
7 8 9
Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 143, 207, 216, 219, 252. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 229, 268–9. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 275–6, 291–2.
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selves, at Westminster, in the pulpit and press, and in the New Model army. Most Members of Parliament still wished to see a compulsory national church, along the Presbyterian lines favoured by most members of the Westminster Assembly, a body of divines established to recommend a new church settlement. But the Independents disagreed; though sharing the same Calvinist theology, they viewed the Presbyterian structure as oppressive. Separatist groups, such as the Baptists, felt this even more strongly, demanding the freedom to worship in their own voluntary, non-parochial congregations. Many army leaders supported their pleas. Oliver Cromwell reported that religious differences (at least among different branches of the Calvinist brotherhood) did not disturb the harmony he reported in the New Model and insisted that freedom could be equally unproblematic elsewhere. He dropped broad hints that soldiers risking their lives to serve parliament would expect to enjoy the freedom they had surely earned.10 Rigid Presbyterians waged an energetic counter-attack. Thomas Edwards, a ferociously combative minister, complained that the de facto toleration of the war years had already spawned a flood of heretical and blasphemous ideas. Any formal toleration, he warned, would be infinitely worse, leading inevitably to the collapse of religious, moral, social, and political order.11 The issue of religious pluralism was thus now firmly placed on the political stage. The old Church of England was still defended vigorously by the king; the Presbyterians enjoyed a power-base in Parliament and support from the Scots; the Independents had some support in parliament, and much more in the officer corps of the New Model army; and the separatists had allies both in the emerging Leveller movement and in the army. In August 1647 the army leaders issued The Heads of the Proposals with a set of remarkable and carefully-worded religious provisions. They appeared to allow for the survival of both bishops (stripped of their coercive powers) and the old prayer-book services (on a voluntary basis). No ecclesiastical officer was to possess any coercive power, and dissenters (though not Catholics) would enjoy the right to worship in their own separate meetings. Parliamentary orders and ordinances concerning the Covenant would be repealed. It 10
W. C. Abbott (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, vol. 1 (Oxford: 1988), i.360, 377–8. 11 Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London: 1646), i.120–4; Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: 2004).
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remained unclear what form the non-compulsory established church would take, and General Ireton and his colleagues probably expected this to be clarified in the course of negotiations with the king.12 A few weeks later the Levellers, a radical London-based movement with considerable support among the army rank-and-file, came up with a still bolder proposal. Their Agreement of the People, a constitutional outline, proclaimed religious freedom a fundamental right, with which no government might meddle. The state might, at most, make provision for some form of public instruction, non-compulsory. Whether by accident or design, Catholics and even non-Christians would have received protection under such a guarantee. Hard bargaining with the officers eventually resulted in a revised Agreement, still radical by most contemporary standards. It now provided for a non-compulsory national church, with freedom of worship guaranteed for other Christians; whether this should extend to Catholics and Episcopalians was left undecided.13 Neither the king nor parliament would have been willing to go so far, though a new flexibility was in the air. Writing to the Lords in November 1647, Charles himself declared that while he could not accept the abolition of episcopacy, he was now willing to see bishops work in tandem with the Presbyterian authorities. And he expressed a readiness to let the Presbyterian model remain in force for three years, until a permanent settlement could be established by agreement. Any Protestants unable to accept such a final settlement, “upon conscientious grounds”, would enjoy “full liberty”. Parliament responded by demanding that Charles accept a Presbyterian national church, with a grudging toleration for Protestant dissenters that explicitly excluded the old prayer-book services.14 All these manoeuvres were overtaken by events. The army staged a coup in December 1648, purging moderates from parliament and paving the way for the trial and execution of the king a few weeks later. With the monarchy and House of Lords abolished and a depleted Commons now dominated by Independents, the political climate was transformed. The fledgling Commonwealth began to inch towards multiconfessionalism. While the Presbyterian church settlement approved in 1646–7 remained technically in force, it was implemented 12
Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 321; Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen (Oxford: 1987), 163. 13 Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 334, 369–70. 14 Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 328–9, 345–6.
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only in a few areas, notably London and Lancashire, and had no teeth; separatists were left unmolested. Early in April 1649 the Baptist leader William Kiffin presented a petition to the Commons, pledging the movement’s allegiance and repudiating the Levellers, whereupon the Commons’ Speaker, William Lenthall, responded with an assurance that separatist churches would enjoy freedom and protection, as long as they remained peaceable.15 Though merely verbal, this declaration marked the first formal step towards religious freedom. Further progress proved painfully slow. A bill introduced in June 1649 to repeal the Elizabethan statutes, requiring all adults to attend their parish church, took 15 months to pass, a reminder that only a few Members of Parliament genuinely favoured the radicals and that most saw wooing the Presbyterians as a far more pressing concern. A fierce Blasphemy Act in 1650, criminalising a range of beliefs associated with those known as Ranters, served this goal and received far more publicity.16 Only with Cromwell’s installation as Lord Protector in December 1653 did multiconfessionalism receive more positive endorsement. The new constitution, The Instrument of Government, provided for a non-compulsory national church and guaranteed freedom of worship for those of different judgments, though not to “Popery or Prelacy”.17 The Humble Petition and Advice of 1657, modifying the Instrument’s provisions, laid out a set of very broad fundamental beliefs which all must accept, while confirming the freedom enjoyed by those who differed over matters of worship or discipline (with the usual exceptions of papists and prelatists). It called for the punishment of those who disrupted parish services (a swipe at the confrontational tactics of the Quakers) but added an important new guarantee that religious non-conformists were also eligible for “any civil trust, employment or promotion”.18 How far Cromwell really believed in the principle of religious toleration and pluralism is a matter of some debate. It has been argued that his genuine tolerance extended only to the Calvinist brotherhood of Independents, Presbyterians, and Particular Baptists and that he hoped
15 Commons Journals, vi.177–8; Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints (Cambridge: 1977), 181–3. 16 Commons Journals, vi.245, 255, 474; C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–1660 (London: 1911), ii.409–12; Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge: 1974), 121, 232–3, 238–9. 17 Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 416. 18 Gardiner Constitutional Documents, 454–5.
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they would eventually be able to reunite.19 There is little sign that he expected any such reconciliation in the foreseeable future, however; in 1654 he told Parliament that religious freedom must remain a “fundamental” principle “for us and the generations to come”. Moreover his tolerance extended in practice well beyond the Calvinist circle: to General Baptists, who modified Calvinism, to peaceful Quakers, who rejected it outright, and even to Jews, whose readmission to England he promoted. And if Anglicans and Catholics remained beyond the pale, they fared far better than they had probably anticipated.20 What is certain is that public opinion, both inside and outside Parliament, was far less tolerant than the Protector. The Parliament of 1654–5 tried to water down the guarantees enshrined in the Instrument, and the Parliament of 1656–8 imposed a brutal punishment upon the misguided Quaker leader, James Nayler, accused of blasphemy and narrowly escaping with his life. These tensions prompt a more general question: how far did the religious freedoms now guaranteed by law correspond to social realities? Were dissenting groups able to meet in peace? In practice, religious freedom often required firm intervention by the central authorities, both under the Commonwealth and the Cromwellian Protectorate. Many local magistrates proved unsympathetic, and the general public viewed separatists as dangerous and divisive. For their part, moderate puritan ministers who had inveighed against episcopal persecution in the 1630s now demanded a monopoly for their own beliefs and practices. Nicholas Darton, a moderate Episcopalian, complained in 1649 that two parish churches in Oxford had been shut up and barricaded to prevent him and others from preaching there. The local Presbyterians were demanding a monopoly for themselves. Monopolies in the secular sphere had been condemned, Darton observed, so why should there be a “monopoly upon divinity? And a monopoly upon churches? And a monopoly upon men’s consciences?” Had not Parliament promised religious freedom?21 This was a novel line of argument indeed from an Episcopalian clergyman. 19 Blair Worden, “Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate”, in W. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration (Studies in Church History) 21 (Oxford: 1984). 20 Abbott, Writings, iii.459; Bernard Capp, “Cromwell and Toleration”, in Jane Mills (ed.), Cromwell’s Legacy (forthcoming, 2011); Coffey, Persecution and Toleration, 147–9. 21 Nicholas Darton, Ecclesia Anglicana, or Dartons Cleare & Protestant Manifesto (1649), 2, 5.
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Minority groups also had to contend with far more direct challenges to the principle of religious freedom. Separatists in Oxford were forced to beg for government protection in December 1651, after townsfolk and students rioted against their assemblies. The Council of State responded with stern letters ordering the Mayor, Vice-Chancellor, and college heads to investigate and prevent any similar disturbances. The government also intervened after a riot in London in October 1653 against Edmund Chillenden’s Baptist congregation, which worshipped with official approval in the Stone Chapel of what had been St. Paul’s Cathedral. There were disturbances too at Lowestoft in February 1654, aimed at a gathered congregation which met in a chapel there. Sympathetic magistrates investigated and secured an order from the Council that the congregation’s freedom should be protected and any further disturbances prosecuted.22 Separatists also encountered hostility and obstruction from many local magistrates and parish officials. Hester Hobson, for example, the wife of a prominent Baptist, was stopped by a local justice while she was riding to a service in County Durham one Sunday in August 1657. Accusing her of profaning the Sabbath, the justice, George Lilburne, seized her horse and demanded a heavy fine for its return. Hester complained to the Council that his action was a flagrant breach of the constitution. The Council ordered an investigation and had Lilburne dismissed from office. The following year, the Congregationalist church in Warwick complained that one Ralph Blick, parish constable of a nearby village, had indicted a church-member at the recent assizes for absenteeism from his parish church and had sought to have him fined 2s 6d for each occasion under an Elizabethan statute now repealed. The Council condemned his action.23 Hostile local magistrates enjoyed considerable success, however, in harrying Quaker preachers and their followers. They found grounds to jail Quakers on charges such as refusing to take an oath or pay tithes, or disrupting church services, and here they had both law and public opinion on their side. Cromwell himself was often deeply irritated by Quaker behaviour. But Cromwell regarded most Quakers as genuinely godly, if misguided, and was sympathetic to pleas that they were being victimized by intolerant magistrates. The late 1650s saw a flurry of letters from the Council to
22 23
CSPD, 1651–2, 81–2; CSPD, 1652–3, 423; CSPD, 1653–4, 205; CSPD, 1654, 3. CSPD, 1657–8, 78–9, 101; CSPD, 1658–9, 28, 31.
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local authorities around the country, demanding to know how many Quakers were held in custody, on what charges, for how long, and on what authority.24 Separatists were by no means the only people to face persecution or breed division. In many parishes an ejected Episcopalian minister refused to accept his removal, and he or his supporters did all they could to obstruct his successor. Thomas Jessop, intruded at Luton, Bedfordshire, in 1650, was still fighting a rearguard action eight years later against a “malignant” faction, who persuaded parishioners to boycott his services and attend private, prayer-book meetings instead. One of their leaders even broke into the church one night to conduct an illegal prayer-book funeral service, in open defiance of Jessop, who eventually abandoned the struggle and moved away.25 Religious freedom often became entangled, as here, with disputes over the control of sacred space or, more generally, with the availability of suitable premises for worship. This was a particular problem for dissenting groups: where could they meet, if no member had a sufficiently large house? At Wantage the gathered church met in the townhall, or the “village house” of nearby Grove. After encountering local hostility, they secured government authorization in 1653 to continue using these premises undisturbed, whenever they were not required for court sessions or public business. But in late 1654 they complained of being locked out of the town-hall on the orders of the new steward, Thomas Holt, who was also a Member of Parliament for nearby Abingdon, a reminder of the tensions within the ruling elites. Major Francis Allen, an army officer and religious radical, came to their rescue and secured a new Council order confirming their rights.26 Other congregations using civic or parish premises also took care to have the arrangements confirmed by Whitehall. A newly formed Baptist church at Chard (Somerset) successfully petitioned early in 1655 to be allowed to meet in the town’s shire-hall when not in use, explaining that none of the members had a suitable house. And when a congregation at Wedmore (Somerset) asked to meet in a room in the church-house there, explaining that it was only occasionally used for business, the Council directed local magistrates to see the worshippers’ right main-
24 25 26
CSPD, 1656–7, 122–3, 133, 229–30, 262, 278; CSPD, 1657–8, 156–7. CSPD, 1658–9, 37. CSPD, 1652–3, 381; CSPD, 1654, 385–6; CSPD, 1655, 2.
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tained.27 Religious radicals recognised that their best chance of help and protection would generally come from central government, not local magistrates. In September 1653 parliament even voted to award land and materials to a separatist congregation in Barking, Essex, to build what may have been England’s first purpose-built nonconformist meeting-house.28 Gathered churches were often forced to look for larger premises once numbers made it impractical to meet in members’ homes. One Baptist church in London hired a room in Glaziers’ Hall, in Thames Street. Another, in Southwark, had a large meeting-room capable of holding hundreds.29 By the late 1650s some were looking for more permanent solutions. In October 1658 the Baptist William Kiffin and his friends petitioned for a grant of premises in the Old Artillery Ground in London, for 99 years, for use by his congregation. The Council, sympathetic, ordered a survey of the site to see whether this could be granted without prejudice to the state.30 Other groups, notably moderate Congregationalists and even some Baptists, sought to worship in the parish church itself, when it was not required for parish services. The shared use of churches was common whenever the pastor of a gathered congregation was also minister of the parish itself, as was often the case in Norfolk and Suffolk, including the two churches in Ipswich. At Sheffield too, James Fisher served as both vicar of the parish and pastor of a Congregational church.31 Such a dual arrangement was attractive on both ideological and financial grounds. It enabled the minister and members to maintain the “purity” of their church and sacraments while still bringing the gospel to the unconverted majority. More prosaically, separatist groups often found it a heavy financial burden to hire premises from local civic bodies as well as supporting their pastor. The Baptist church in Exeter turned to the government and secured an order in March 1656 granting it the best-repaired of the superfluous churches in the city. Similarly the Independent church at Bury St. Edmunds petitioned Cromwell and his Council, complaining that they had to hire the shire-house “at a great rent” because the 27
CSPD, 1655, 30–1, 61. Commons Journals, vii.316. It is unclear whether it was ever erected. 29 Michael Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford: 1978), 161; William Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (London: 1923), 379. 30 CSPD, 1658–9, 191. 31 G. Nuttall, Visible Saints (Oxford: 1957), 22–3; A. G. Matthews (ed.), Calamy Revised (Oxford: 1988), 198, 229, 465. 28
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Presbyterians controlled both parish churches. They begged to use one church themselves, or at least its chancel, which they suggested could be divided from the body of the church. In 1659 the restored Commonwealth ordered the Bury magistrates to accede to the petitioners’ wishes.32 Dual use of the parish church could bring its own problems, however. If a minister refused to administer the Lord’s Supper to those not members of his gathered congregation, or baptize their children, he might well find angry parishioners refusing to pay tithes or even going to law to remove him from office.33 Rival claims to church and pulpit were particularly bitter when the beneficed minister was at war with a parish lecturer with his own supporters, or with a gathered congregation with its own pastor. In such cases the government itself sometimes had to intervene and adjudicate. Thus in January 1652 the Council of State ordered the mayor of Dartmouth to ensure that John Pendarves, a Baptist pastor, should enjoy free access to the pulpit of St. Saviour’s on Sundays after 4 o’clock, Friday afternoons, and at any other time when it was not required by the parish minister.34 The London parish of St. Botolph’s, Aldgate, witnessed a prolonged and bitter struggle between the combative Presbyterian minister, Zachary Crofton, and the Baptist lecturer, John Simpson, and their respective supporters. The Council’s order in February 1657, that Simpson should be allowed to preach from the pulpit on Sunday afternoons and one weekday, failed to restore peace. On 31 July Crofton sent his rival a terse note, announcing his intention to preach on Sunday between one and two, ordering him to stay away, and challenging him to sue if he would not agree. Instead Simpson persuaded the Council to confirm its earlier order, though to no avail; his supporters subsequently lodged a complaint to Cromwell and the Council that he had been physically barred from the pulpit. Two senior Councillors, MajorGeneral Fleetwood and Sir Gilbert Pickering, were thereupon deputed to arbitrate. Crofton, they reported, was willing to let Simpson use the pulpit from 3 o’clock; for his part, Simpson was demanding right of access from 2 o’clock. If religious freedom raised issues of profound significance, its battles could be extraordinarily petty and personal.
32 33 34
CSPD, 1655–6, 224; CSPD, 1659–60, 225; Watts, Dissenters, 158. Watts, Dissenters, 153–5. CSPD, 1651–2, 91.
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Ninety-four of Simpson’s supporters raised the stakes still further in October, denouncing Crofton as an enemy to the Commonwealth and calling for him to be removed.35 An equally fraught situation developed at Hull, where the rival supporters of the Presbyterian lecturer, John Shaw, and the army garrison’s radical chaplain, John Canne, struggled over control of Holy Trinity, the town’s main church. In 1650 the Council intervened, ordering the Deputy-Governor to make the two ministers share it, with Shaw having priority. That failed to settle a dispute between two ministers equally pugnacious. A wall was eventually built dividing the chancel from the main body of the church, allowing both congregations to worship at the same time; it was so thick that Canne’s followers in the chancel could not even hear the psalms being sung by Shaw’s huge congregation. Even so, the feud rumbled on. Canne attacked Shaw in print as “corrupt and rotten”, and forwarded articles against him to the Council of State in 1653, calling for him to be turned out.36 Quakers and the more radical separatists would have found it unthinkable to use parish churches for their own worship. Both defined the church as a body of true believers; buildings were irrelevant, mere “steeple-houses” in the Quakers’ dismissive phrase. The first Quakers in London met initially in private houses, and often continued to use them for private meetings, but early in 1655 they hired a huge meeting-room above the Bull and Mouth tavern in Aldersgate, premises which could hold a thousand people, standing. The new venue, used for meetings also open to non-Quakers, witnessed many stormy confrontations. When the early Quakers of Southwark outgrew the private houses where they had initially met, a prosperous widow erected a meeting-house behind some houses she was building in Horsleydown, which survived until eventually demolished on the king’s orders in 1670. A Quaker group in Spitalfields assembled first in a private house, then in a large tent, and finally in another purposebuilt meeting-house, which in this case survived Restoration attempts at suppression.37 A similar development appeared to be under way at Newcastle, when a leading Quaker hired a large house in the Cornmarket in 1657 as a meeting-house, but when the Quakers assembled 35
CSPD, 1656–7, 272; CSPD, 1657–8, 48, 52, 62, 64–5, 133–4. CSPD, 1650, 452; 1653–4, 91; The Life of Master John Shaw in C. Jackson (ed.), Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies (Surtees Society, 65, 1875), 143–5, 423. 37 Braithwaite, Beginnings, 182–5, 379–80. 36
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on market-day, the mayor forbade their meeting as a threat to public order.38 Parish churches played a significant role in the later 1640s and 1650s as the venue for crowded public disputations arranged between parish clergy, separatist preachers, and Quaker missionaries. Such assemblies, often lasting for hours, could attract huge and sometimes rowdy audiences, with rival supporters applauding their champions and jeering, hissing, and stamping their feet at their opponents. The audience might also join in, as at “a great meeting for a dispute” at Leicester in 1648. The young George Fox, later a leading Quaker, found Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and “common-prayer-men” (supporters of the pre-war services) in fierce debate, some speaking from the pulpit, others from the pews. A woman joined in, and so did Fox. When the meeting eventually broke up in confusion, many of the participants moved to an inn close by to resume their debate.39 Such public debates became one of the defining religious features of the interregnum. A dispute at Ellesmere in Shropshire in 1656 between Presbyterians and Baptists attracted an audience of “some thousands” and lasted five hours. At Rochester Cathedral, the radical preacher Richard Coppin took on opponents over four days of acrimonious debate in December 1655 with the mayor, magistrates, and army officers in attendance as well as jeering and cheering townsfolk. If such occasions displayed little of the calm, rational debate central to Habermas’s conception of an emerging “public sphere”, they underlined the fact that religious diversity had become a recognised, though not yet accepted, feature of public life. The authorities intervened only when they anticipated a serious threat to public order or feared the occasion would be used to promulgate blasphemy. Receiving information in June 1655 that the Socinian John Biddle had denied the divinity of Christ in a huge public debate at Chillenden’s congregation in St. Paul’s and was intending to resume the debate, the Council ordered Biddle’s arrest and banned any further meeting.40 The interregnum saw two further important steps towards multiconfessionalism. First, several of the radical groups quickly developed
38
The Publick Intelligencer, 117 (11–18 Jan. 1658), 232. George Fox, Journal, ed. J. Nickalls (Cambridge: 1952), 24–5. 40 Thomas Porter, A True and Faithfull Narrative . . . of a Publique Dispute (London: 1656), 1, 21; Richard Coppin, A Blow at the Serpent (London: 1656); CSPD, 1655, 224. 39
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a degree of provincial and even national organisation. By the later 1650s we are not looking at isolated congregations but at movements with elaborate structures, both formal and informal. The General Baptists held a regional assembly in the midlands in 1651, and a national assembly in London three years later. The Particular (Calvinist) Baptists developed a network of associations linking churches in South Wales, the midlands, the west, and London with each other and with other associations. The Independent (Congregationalist) evolution was slower, but in 1658 representatives from over a hundred churches assembled at the Savoy Conference in London. The Quakers too quickly developed an informal regional and national framework.41 In each case, these were steps towards the development of major and lasting denominations. Second, and equally important, men from outside the loose Cromwellian church were able to play a role in public life and hold public office. While this right was only formally recognized by the Humble Petition and Advice in 1657, it operated in practice throughout the interregnum. In 1656 the separatist colonels Edward Whalley and Thomas Pride were chosen to sit as Lords in Cromwell’s new upper house in Parliament. William Kiffin, Baptist preacher and merchant, sat as a Member of Parliament for Middlesex in the parliament of 1656–8. The naval officer corps included many religious radicals too, such as Vice-Admiral William Goodson, a member of the Stepney Congregational church. William Burton, a member of the Congregationalist church at Great Yarmouth, was busily involved in public life throughout the 1650s as Bailiff, Alderman, Member of Parliament, and naval administrator. In London, Thomas Andrewes, a member of Sidrach Simpson’s Independent congregation, and Robert Tichborn, a member of George Cockayne’s gathered church, both served as Lord Mayor. The lawyer John Cook, who had led the prosecution at the king’s trial in January 1649, was also a member of a gathered church.42 Such examples could be multiplied. There were of course limits to the religious freedoms enjoyed in the 1650s. Catholic and “prelatist” worship was explicitly excluded by the Cromwellian constitution, and Catholics were excluded from 41
Watts, Dissenters, 166–7; Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven: 1964), 58–9, 66. 42 Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 22, 65, 156–9, 187–8; and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter ODNB] (Oxford: 2004) for all these.
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office and the right to vote.43 Cromwell allowed Jews to return to England but had to abandon his attempt to secure them a legal footing. A report that the Jews wanted to buy a beautiful room in Whitehall (perhaps the Banqueting House) to use as a synagogue was probably no more than alarmist rumor.44 Had Cromwell lived longer, it is just possible that prayer-book supporters who kept clear of politics might in time have received some measure of formal toleration. Cromwell’s son and successor, Richard, had less interest in toleration and little sympathy for religious radicals. The flavour of his only parliament was also intolerant; in February 1659 it called for a bill to tighten the law against using the prayer-book and established a committee to advise on measures to suppress Quakers, Catholics, anti-sabbatarians, antiTrinitarians, and Jewish worship.45 The “religious freedom” of the 1650s inevitably meant something very different in Scotland and Ireland, which had very different religious cultures and histories. Both were conquered by Cromwellian armies after they had rejected the Commonwealth and declared for Charles II in 1649, and both were formally covered by the religious guarantees of the Instrument of Government. The Scots had already been forced to accept a settlement early in 1652, by which religious toleration was extended to all Protestants (except Episcopalians). In practice, the settlement changed little. While tiny groups of Independents, Baptists, and Quakers emerged, Scottish religious life continued to be dominated by the Presbyterians, split between rival “Protesters” and “Resolutioners”. The two groups were bitterly divided over politics rather than faith. The Protesters adhered rigidly to the Solemn League and Covenant, hated royalists, distrusted Charles II, and loathed the far more numerous Resolutioners for their readiness to compromise with Charles II and his supporters. Paradoxically, that made them more willing to work with the Cromwellian authorities, on the basis of hating the Resolutioners even more. Initially the English therefore favored the Protesters, but they also pressed the Resolutioners to come to terms with the new regime, with some success; in 1655 the Resolutioners grudgingly agreed to live peaceably under it and to stop praying for Charles II. The main concern of the Cromwellian authorities
43
Gardiner, op. cit., 410, 416, 449. David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603– 1655 (Oxford: 1982); CSPD, 1658–9, 367. 45 The Publick Intelligencer, 165 (21–8 Feb. 1659), 254. 44
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throughout was to reduce the Presbyterian clergy’s political influence and the Resolutioners’ royalist commitment, not to protect religious minorities. Their main achievement was to prevent the rival Presbyterian parties from an all-out, fratricidal conflict.46 The Irish situation offered a sharp contrast. Since Elizabethan times, a Protestant elite had ruled over a nation still overwhelmingly Catholic. A Protestant Church of Ireland ministered to the ruling elite, while Catholic priests tended to the majority, risking arrest and execution, and operating with varying degrees of danger or safety, according to the zeal and resources of the local English authorities. Ulster, in the north, had been dominated by Scottish Presbyterian settlers from the early 1600s. The Catholic rebellion of 1641 destroyed the English ascendancy in most of the island, and during the 1640s a thousand friars and several hundred secular priests were able to minister freely to the Catholic majority, except in Ulster and around Dublin. A shared hatred of the puritan regime in England led Ormond, the royalist commander in Ireland, to agree to a treaty with the Confederates (the Irish Catholics) in January 1649, in which he pledged that Catholic worship would not be disturbed and that the king would consider their request for the formal recognition of the Irish Catholic Church. The king’s execution two weeks later, followed by the Cromwellian invasion and reconquest in 1649–53, transformed the situation. A loose state church was erected, dominated by Independents with some participation by Presbyterians and former Church of Ireland ministers. As in England, the Presbyterian clergy, initially hostile to the Commonwealth regime, gradually reached an accommodation, especially after Henry Cromwell had become Lord Deputy. Outside the state church, Baptists and Quakers gained a small foothold, mainly among the English soldiery. Catholic worship was now brutally suppressed. Seventy Catholic clergy were executed after the conquest, including three bishops, and over a thousand were imprisoned and exiled. But the new regime had neither the resources nor the will to convert the masses, and by the late 1650s a small band of itinerant Catholic clergy, living precariously, were once more operating in the countryside.47
46 Gordon Donaldson, Scotland: James V to James VII (Edinburgh: 1965), 336–42, 353–6; Frances Dow, Cromwellian Scotland 1651–1660 (Edinburgh: 1979), 26–30, 58–61, 102–5, 195–210. 47 T. W. Moody et al. (eds.), A New History of Ireland: Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691, (Oxford: 1976), 375–86; Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641–1660 (Cambridge: 1995), 201–40.
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The restoration of monarchy in 1660 marked a dramatic shift in religious policy throughout Britain. In the Declaration of Breda, issued only a few weeks before his return, Charles II deplored the religious “passion and uncharitableness” of recent years, declared “a liberty to tender consciences”, and promised to approve any bill that might be offered by Parliament “for the full granting that indulgence”.48 The Cavalier House of Commons elected in 1661, and the leaders of the restored Anglican Church, had other ideas. Many equated puritan and sectarian religion with rebellion, treason, and fanaticism and adhered to the traditional belief that unity was essential in both church and state. It was self-evidently wrong, they believed, to tolerate beliefs that were heretical or blasphemous. Others were swayed by the desire for revenge. The result was a series of punitive measures between 1661 and 1665, later dubbed the “Clarendon Code”. In the years immediately following the Restoration, over 2,000 ministers were ejected from parishes in England and Wales, with hundreds of magistrates similarly removed from county benches and urban corporations. Nonconformists were prosecuted in large numbers for attending religious assemblies now proscribed as illegal “conventicles”. Most of those ejected, dismissed, fined, or imprisoned were not radical sectarians but mainstream puritans who had happily worshipped within the broad Cromwellian church. The persecution was fierce and often vindictive. Yet it never seemed likely that repression could destroy the nonconformists altogether. Many preachers and their followers found ingenious ways to evade arrest, some local officials connived at their meetings, and some magistrates eventually wearied of the apparently endless pursuit. Moreover, in some corporations, like Coventry, men of nonconformist sympathies contrived to hold civic office by the practice of “occasional conformity”, attending Anglican services just often enough to meet the formal requirements. And in Essex even some Quakers could be found holding parish offices, such as overseer of the poor, or sitting on the vestry, with the connivance of the local authorities; elsewhere some served as parish constables.49 Charles himself went along reluctantly with the campaign of repression. No zealot, he always feared that persecution might drive non48
Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 466. Watts, Dissenters, 221–56; Coffey, Persecution, 166–77; Anthony Fletcher, “The Enforcement of the Conventicle Acts, 1664–1679,” in Sheils, Persecution; Alan Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725 (Oxford: 2000), 244–6. 49
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conformists to plot or rebel. In March 1672, while parliament was prorogued, Charles dramatically reversed policy by issuing a Declaration of Indulgence. Observing that persecution had manifestly failed, he suspended all laws against Catholics and nonconformists, and invited nonconformists to apply for licences to preach in approved premises. Not all nonconformists welcomed the gesture, for this liberty would rest on royal prerogative alone, not law. Some dissenters accordingly held back, including all the Quakers. Nonetheless, over the following year some 1610 licences were issued to Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, in a ratio of roughly 4:2:1. Many nonconformist assemblies were soon packed, swelled by sympathisers who had earlier stayed away through fear of prosecution. Some groups were sufficiently confident to erect their own, purpose-built meeting-houses, as at Leeds and Great Yarmouth, where the congregation raised £800 and erected a substantial building with its own galleries.50 The Indulgence proved short-lived. When parliament reassembled, it challenged the king’s power to suspend the laws and quickly forced him to withdraw the Declaration, in March 1673. The penal laws were now reinforced. The Test Act (1673) required all office-holders to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance and to make a declaration repudiating the Catholic faith; among its victims was the king’s own brother and heir, James, duke of York, a Catholic convert forced to resign as Lord Admiral. Another Test Act, in 1678, extended these restrictions to parliament itself; no Catholic peer could henceforth sit in the Lords, and all men elected to the Commons were required to take the oaths and make the declaration as specified in 1673. With fears of popery intensifying following the exposure of an alleged Popish Plot in 1678, public opinion began to shift toward the Protestant dissenters, now viewed more positively as allies against popery. In 1680 a new parliament, dominated by the more sympathetic Whigs, saw bills introduced for Comprehension and Toleration, designed to reunite the church and relieve any dissenters left outside it. But another political shift meant that both bills failed; and with the Whigs shattered by the Rye House Plot, the Anglican Tories regained their ascendancy. Whig sympathisers were purged from county benches and urban corporations, and with Charles no longer disposed to protect nonconformists,
50 J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge: 1966), 407–8; Watts, Dissenters, 247–9.
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the final years of his reign saw a new wave of persecution, the fiercest of all.51 The Restoration era in Scotland witnessed similarly sharp fluctuations between phases of persecution and leniency. Episcopacy was restored in 1661, and by 1663 268 of the more rigid Presbyterian ministers, (a quarter of all the Scottish clergy), had been ejected. Presbyterianism remained strong and defiant, however, in much of lowland Scotland. Charles gave a limited toleration to former Protesters in 1669, but a new wave of repression soon followed, provoking fierce opposition which culminated in the assassination of Archbishop James Sharp of St. Andrews in 1679 and an armed rebellion. As in England, the last years of Charles II’s reign saw a new wave of fierce repression, with a Scottish Test Act (1681) aimed at Presbyterians rather than Catholics.52 In Ireland, the Restoration had also brought the return of the episcopalian Church, though it had little presence in most of the country. In Ulster, where 60 nonconformist ministers were ejected, the regime lacked the resources to crush the Presbyterian dominance of the province. For their part, Catholics enjoyed a considerable measure of informal toleration, and Catholic bishops were even able to hold a synod in Dublin in 1670. Periods of persecution also occurred, however, triggered by alarms on the mainland, and culminated in 1681 with the execution of Oliver Plunkett, Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, for alleged treason.53 The short reign of James II, succeeding his brother in 1685, saw yet another reversal of policy: a renewed experiment in English multiconfessionalism and major shifts in Scotland and Ireland too. Catholics naturally hoped that a monarch of their own faith would improve their situation. Nonconformists had little reason to expect any such change, and after the brutal suppression of Monmouth’s rebellion in the autumn of 1685, in which many dissenters had taken part, their prospects looked grim. James even requisitioned several dissenters’ meeting-houses in London and turned them into army barracks.54 Royal policy soon changed, however. James had commissioned a number 51 Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 408–10, 461–2, 465–6; J. R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution (London: 1972), 181–5; Coffey, Persecution, 172–87. 52 Donaldson, Scotland, 360–72; J. Buckroyd, Church and State in Scotland 1660– 1681 (Edinburgh: 1980). 53 Moody, New History, 429–38. 54 John Childs, The Army, James II and the Glorious Revolution (Manchester: 1980), 88–9.
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of Catholic officers into the army to deal with the rebellion, using the royal prerogative to dispense with the Test Acts and, once the crisis was over, made it clear that he intended to retain them. When parliament objected it was hastily dissolved. James thereupon embarked on a radical policy designed to break the shackles of the Anglican Tory elite, and secure a free hand in both secular and religious matters. In a crucial test case, Godden v Hales (1686), the judges upheld the king’s right to dispense with the law’s requirements in appointing military and civil officers. In April 1687 James issued a Declaration of Indulgence, renewed a year later, which suspended all penal laws against Catholics and nonconformists, and granted them freedom of worship and the right to hire or build their own meeting-houses. Persecution ceased, and the prisons were emptied of religious prisoners. For the first time Catholics were also able to hire buildings for worship, and by 1688 most large provincial towns had Catholic chapels. London had 18, some linked to embassies, others in the suburbs, and one in the heart of the city, in Lime Street, despite attempts by the Lord Mayor to suppress it and riots by enraged citizens. A similar Declaration in Scotland gave freedom of public worship to Catholics and Quakers. Presbyterians, viewed by James as his unrelenting enemies and initially excluded, were brought into the fold by a second proclamation a few months later, in June 1687.55 James acknowledged that his ideal would be a nation wholly Catholic. Recognising the impossibility of that dream, he promised to protect the Established Church, but he remained determined to use his prerogative powers to secure far more than a bare toleration for Catholics and nonconformists and to free the crown from the Anglican-Tory stranglehold. By this point a significant proportion of moderate opinion would have been willing to see laws against nonconformists relaxed, but politically-motivated fear and suspicion of Catholicism remained strong. It was this fear, indeed, which was helping to make the nonconformists more acceptable, as memories of the civil war gradually faded. Committed Tory Anglicans remained strongly opposed to any toleration, and by the end of 1685 James had purged a huge swath of such men from the magistracy throughout England. His long-term ambition
55 Kenyon, Stuart Constitution, 410–3, 483–9; John Miller, Popery and Politics in England 1660–1688 (Cambridge: 1973), 243–8; Western, Monarchy, 187, 206–8; Donaldson, Scotland, 382–4.
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was to secure a parliament that would repeal all the penal legislation, and to that end he ordered Lords-Lieutenant in each county to see whether local justices would support such a programme. Hundreds of justices of the peace, who made it clear they would oppose any such move, were removed and replaced by Catholics, nonconformists, and compliant time-servers. By 1688 there were over 400 Catholic justices, about a quarter of the total—all the more striking as Catholics comprised little more than 1 percent of the population. Urban corporations were similarly purged. At Great Yarmouth, six aldermen and 11 councilors were removed in January 1688, with several leading Congregationalists nominated to replace them, including several elderly Cromwellian veterans. In London, James forced the aged and reluctant William Kiffin to serve as an alderman in 1687–8.56 Catholics also appeared in many other spheres of public life. The Anglican monopoly in the two universities was undermined, and by 1687 three colleges had Catholic heads. When the Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, objected to James’s attempt to impose one there too, they were almost all deprived of their posts.57 Some Catholics now also held high government office. By 1688 13 members of James’s Privy Council were Catholics, including his chief minister, the earl of Sunderland (a convert); moreover the head of the Treasury, the earl of Rochester, was dismissed after he refused to convert. There were Catholic Lords-Lieutenant and sheriffs, and Catholic mayors at Newcastle, Worcester, Gloucester, and Stafford. Catholics remained a minority in all these roles, but James’s determination to entrench their position in every branch of public life was plain.58 The same applied to the army. Catholics comprised only about 11 percent of the officer corps in 1688, with little evidence that the king aspired to transform its overall character. But he was clearly signalling that the crown no longer felt tied to any particular faith. Moreover, Ireland had experienced far more radical change. Within a short period the officer corps of the Irish army was wholly replaced by Catholics, mostly from Old English families, with a similar mass purge of civic and governmental bodies, including the judiciary. Irish Catholic bishops even began to
56
Miller, Popery, 218–9; Perry Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth, 1660– 1722 (Oxford: 1996), 167–8; ODNB, Kiffin. 57 Miller, Popery, 240; Western, Monarchy, 198–202. 58 Miller, Popery, 219–22.
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receive modest salaries from the state itself, and new Catholic schools and convents sprang up.59 In 1688 mounting alarm at James’ Catholic zeal and autocratic tendencies triggered the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and the king’s flight to France. Protestants had drawn together in the face of a perceived common threat, and it seemed unlikely that the new government of William III (a Dutch Calvinist) and his wife Mary would revert to a policy of repression. Beyond that, however, the shape of their religious settlement remained in doubt. Early in 1689 two bills were introduced in the House of Lords, one for Comprehension, the other for Toleration. The first offered concessions in the liturgy designed to tempt moderate nonconformists back into the Church of England. The second promised religious freedom for those Protestants who remained outside. Mixed motives lay behind these initiatives: while some genuinely supported the principle of religious freedom, others saw comprehension as a means to divide and weaken the dissenters and toleration as a device to block any possibility of full emancipation. William hoped for the right to employ Protestants of any persuasion, but parliament, still firmly Anglican, snubbed his request. The Comprehension Bill was dropped, partly because the Presbyterians overplayed their hand, partly through fear that concessions might lead more High Church Anglicans to break away, joining the six bishops and 400 ‘Nonjuring’ clergy who had refused to accept William and Mary. The Toleration Bill did become law, and within a year almost 1200 nonconformist meeting-houses had been registered.60 The Scots were able to force a very different settlement on the new king. William reluctantly had to recognize Presbyterianism as the established church north of the border, and his pleas for moderation were ignored. Episcopacy was swept away, and rampant Presbyterians expelled roughly half of all ministers from their livings for refusing to accept the new order. Many Episcopalians were able to retain their positions in the Highlands, where they were much stronger; elsewhere they now had to operate through private conventicles. The Union of Scotland and England in 1707 left the Presbyterian establishment intact, and it was only by an Act of the British Parliament in 1712 59
Childs, Army, 18–82; Moody, New History, 482. Western, Monarchy, 360–76; Geoffrey Holmes, The Making of a Great Power (London: 1993), 350–6; G. Bennett, “Conflict in the Church,” in G. Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution 1689–1714 (London: 1969), 160–2. 60
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that Episcopalians north of the border received the right to worship in their own meeting-houses. A handful of bishops continued to provide leadership, of sorts, and the church survived precariously. In Ireland it took another invading army, initially led by William himself, to crush the Jacobite and Catholic cause. The Episcopalian Church of Ireland regained its supremacy, with the Presbyterians still entrenched in Ulster and the majority Catholic population once more marginalized, though with its priests no longer persecuted.61 The 1689 Settlement was to define the shape of multiconfessionalism in England until the 19th century. It was far from complete, of course. Catholics remained outside the law, along with Jews and those who denied the Trinity (Unitarians, Socinians, and Deists). Some of these radical thinkers suffered persecution, such as Arthur Bury, removed as head of an Oxford college, and William Whiston, dismissed from his professorial chair of mathematics at Cambridge.62 More important, it was far from certain in 1689 that the Settlement would endure. Neither Anglicans nor Dissenters found it satisfactory, and many Tory politicians and Anglican clergy hoped to rewrite it and, if possible, find some way to secure uniformity. Though Anglicans constituted some 90 percent of the population, they now felt on the defensive. Dissenters were opening new meeting-houses and operating more publicly than ever. They were particularly strong in London with tens of thousands of followers, and in cities such as Norwich, Bristol, and Birmingham they numbered almost a third of the population. Though they were still barred from university, successful dissenting academies appeared to undermine the privileged status of Oxford and Cambridge. And though still excluded from public office by the penal legislation of the 1660s and 1670s, they increasingly found ways to by-pass it through the practice of “occasional conformity”, receiving Anglican communion once to obtain a certificate, and thereafter frequenting a dissenting meeting-house. Moreover, by infiltrating urban corporations, they were increasingly able to influence parliamentary elections and secure sympathetic Members of Parliament. These developments led Churchmen and Tories to raise the cry, “The Church in danger!” and rally popular support. Three bills banning Occasional Conformity were
61 William Ferguson, Scotland, 1689 to the Present (Edinburgh: 1968), 13, 50, 102–12, 127–32; Moody, New History, 505–6. 62 Western, Monarchy, 374; ODNB, Whiston.
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introduced in the Commons in 1702–04, and only narrowly defeated. A High Church demagogue, Henry Sacheverell, stirred up passions still further in 1709, sparking violent riots in the capital in which six meeting-houses were destroyed. A Tory ministry in Queen Anne’s last years pushed through a less extreme Occasional Conformity Act (1711) and a Schism Act (1714) to suppress the academies. But it was too late. The accession of the Hanoverian George I, a Lutheran, brought with it the end of Tory control, and the 1711 and 1714 laws were both repealed in 1719.63 Thereafter religious passions gradually and at last died down. Catholics, still subjected to heavy taxation, remained otherwise largely ignored. Most Dissenters felt content to have secured toleration and did not press for anything more. Full emancipation, for both Catholics and Dissenters, had to wait until the 19th century. Religious life in the 18th century lost much of its earlier fire, and pious clergy (both Anglican and nonconformist) became increasingly preoccupied with new concerns: a perceived decline in public morals and a very real and steep decline in church attendance, especially in the towns. Multiconfessionalism gradually bedded down in a novel atmosphere of religious quiescence.
63 Bennett, ‘Conflict’, 167–74; Watts, Dissenters, 267–89; Geoffrey Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (London: 1967), 101–5.
EARLY MODERN IRELAND AS MULTICONFESSIONAL STATE Raymond Gillespie Across Europe for most of the 16th and 17th centuries rulers sought to apply the principle of cuius regio, euis religio agreed at Augsburg. That the religion of the ruler should also be the religion of his people was clearly both convenient and practical. It provided ideological cohesion for a political entity, and it allowed the state to use the institutions of the church for the maintenance of moral and social order. At least until the middle of the 17th century lapses in this situation were tolerated, but governments were always on the lookout for opportunities to rectify aberrant situations. Perhaps the best known example of this drive for conformity and cohesion was the fate of Bohemia, like Ireland at the edge of Europe, but unlike Ireland composed of a Protestant majority within the larger Catholic Holy Roman Empire. After 1619 the Protestant political elite of Bohemia was eliminated and a program of Catholic evangelization was implemented to ensure not simply political but religious conformity also. The confessional state was a powerful and pervasive force in early modern Europe. At first sight Ireland under English control in the 16th and 17th centuries appears to fit this model of the confessional state. In many respects the legal forms that shaped religious life in Ireland imitated those in England, making it a good example of the attempted creation of a confessional state through a reformation from the monarchy downwards. This contrasted starkly with the reform from below, characteristic of 16th-century Scotland. In England and Ireland the respective Acts of Uniformity that established the Church of England (1558) and its Irish counterpart (1560) as state churches were almost identical. Both created a coterminous religious and political community with the monarch as the head of both state and church. Loyalty to this confessional state was proclaimed by attendance at the parish church on Sunday with a fine of 12d for those who did not do so.1 Again, at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the legislation passed in England and Ireland to create a
1
1 Eliz c. 2 (Eng), 2 Eliz c. 2 (Ire).
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uniformity of worship and structures of church government was almost identical. In both countries the parishes of the established church came to fulfil similar functions, moving from being expressions of local community to instruments of state government, charged with the provision of roads, care of the poor, prevention of fire, and the maintenance of law and order.2 Such linkages between Irish and English legislation on the nature of social and religious order were regarded by some as central to the relationship between the two entities in the 16th and 17th centuries. As the earl of Essex, the lord lieutenant of Ireland in the 1670s, wrote when dealing with the Ulster Presbyterians in 1673, “if some indulgence be granted them I humbly conceive the methods which you may design for England will probably be the fittest to be practised here, for generally the nearer we conform to England in the administration of the government in this county the firmer the interest of the crown [is] supported”.3 Again in 1672, following Charles II’s declaration of indulgence, Essex, trying to find a solution to the problem of controlling large Presbyterian communities, observed to the earl of Arlington “the best solution I can think of would be to do the same here as is practis’d in England which is to license some places and prohibit others”.4 There is much that is attractive about the neat conception of the alignment of theological and secular power in a confessionalized state as set out in the Irish reformation statutes and derived from a quasicolonial relationship with England the early modern period. This view certainly provided a convenient model, used by an earlier generation of Irish historians to describe religious and political change over the early modern period. The idea is all the more beguiling because of its ability to link together a number of disparate themes into a coherent pattern of change, driven by London or Dublin and implemented in the Irish provinces by the officials of the central administration. Thus the government policy of land confiscation and plantation in Ireland could be neatly linked with centrally driven religious change creating a “top-down” model of social and religious change. Thus Protestantism and the English administration in Dublin could be associated with
2 For instance, Raymond Gillespie, “Urban Parishes in Early-Seventeenth-Century Ireland: the Case of Dublin” in Raymond Gillespie and Elizabeth FitzPatrick (eds.), The Parish in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: 2006), 228–41. 3 Osmond Airey (ed.), The Essex Papers, 1672–9 (London: 1890), 77. 4 Airey, Essex Papers, p. 15.
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colonists and Catholicism with the dispossessed and excluded Irish. As one recent survey of 17th-century Ireland has expressed it, the “organising grand narrative of the seventeenth century has been a story of conflict and dispossession as a native elite was progressively displaced by a new colonial ruling class”.5 In this historiographical tradition multiconfessionalism was essentially a side issue. The nature of relations between the various confessions within Ireland was essentially antagonistic, characterized by violence and pre-determined by ethnicity rather than shaped in any other way. This model of confessional relationships has become increasingly difficult to sustain. Even the apparently simple legislative framework that created the confessional state within Ireland was less straightforward than it appears at first sight. When viewed against the legislation passed to maintain the confessional state in 16th-century England, the Irish statutes seem less draconian than their English counterparts. In 1580 anyone who heard Mass in England was fined 200 marks and imprisoned for a year with additional monthly fines imposed on those who did not attend their parish church.6 In 1593 further fines and imprisonment were introduced, and in that same year confiscation of land was provided as a penalty for failure to attend the parish church.7 None of this legislation was applied to Ireland where, it might well have been argued, it was more urgently needed to tackle the problem of Catholic subversion. There may well have been good practical reasons for these differences. The 16th-century Irish parliament met infrequently, and when it did assemble it was difficult to manage effectively, which led to a rather attenuated parliamentary program. The government did have alternative means of introducing legal change in Ireland, most significantly through proclamations, yet these were not deployed. In the 17th century, the pattern was repeated. Ireland lacked a Test Act, a Five Mile Act, or a Conventicle Act, all of which were enacted to control Protestant dissent in late-17th-century England. Again in 1606, after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the penal legislation against Catholics introduced in England, which required them to come to the services of the established church or pay £20 a month or lose two-thirds of their property, found no counterpart in Ireland.
5 6 7
Pádraig Lenihan, Consolidating Conquest: Ireland 1603–1727 (London: 2008), 255. 23 Eliz c. 1 (Eng). 35 Eliz c. 1 (Eng); 35 Eliz c. 2 (Eng).
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There may have been a move to introduce similar legislation in Ireland in 1616, since a book entitled God and the king, which was associated with the 1606 legislation, was ordered to be published in Ireland. Yet, despite this intention the legislation was never enacted.8 In other areas too there are problematic aspects to the thinking of the English administration in Ireland. Before the 1660s Catholics were not excluded from the political nation. Subject to property qualifications they could vote, sit in the Irish parliament, and hold most local offices, and many did so. After the wars of the 1640s, attitudes hardened but this inclusive theoretical definition of a political nation, which encompassed a number of confessions, survived until the beginning of the 18th century. The rise of the fiscal state in the years after the 1690s prompted the London parliament to think more clearly about exactly how the political nation was to be constituted and how the various political nations within the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland would interact. The result was a process of definition of the Irish political nation such as had not been seen in the 16th or 17th centuries. The sacramental test of 1704 may, for convenience, be seen as the beginning of this and its culmination was clearly in the 1728 act that deprived Catholics of the parliamentary franchise. It is certainly true that there had been attempts to remove the vote from Catholics in 1697 and 1698, by requiring an oath denying the deposing power of the pope, but while such an act passed in England it failed to do so in Ireland. Again attempts in 1709 to remove the vote from Catholics were countered by the sort of sentiments set forth in William Molyneux’s Case of Ireland . . . stated (1697), that Catholics could not be bound by laws to which they had not consented. This early-18thcentury activity is clearly related to the emergence of a rather different type of political entity than had existed earlier.9 Exploring these omissions and ambiguities in trying to create a confessional state through legislation is, of course, only one way of highlighting the problems and difficulties of making the realities of life in early modern Ireland coincide with the conceptions of those who viewed that world from the ivory towers of the theological fac-
8
Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland, 1615–25 (London: 1880), 144. J. G. Simms, “The Making of a Penal Law, 1703–4,” Irish Historical Studies 22 (1970–1): 105–18; idem, “Irish Catholics and the Parliamentary Franchise,” Irish Historical Studies 12 (1960–1): 28–37. For a fuller discussion of the penal code and its effects, see Ian MacBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: 2009), 194–250. 9
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ulty of Trinity College, Dublin, the council room of Dublin Castle, or one of the episcopal palaces scattered around the country. Many of the assumptions inherent in the traditional historical interpretations of confessional relations in Ireland have proved difficult to sustain. A case in point is the linkage of Protestantism with newcomers and Catholicism with natives of various hues. Investigation of the beliefs of some of those involved in colonization have revealed a substantial cadre of English Catholic settler landholders in Munster and a few others, such as John Brown of the Neale, in 16th-century Connacht.10 In the early 17th-century plantation of Ulster, driven mainly by Scottish migrants, Catholics too could be found. English Catholics, such as the earl of Castlehaven, appeared among those granted land in the scheme and Scottish Catholics, most significantly the earl of Abercorn, were also prominent among the settlers. The Catholicism of these men was sincere. In the 1640s the settler Castlehaven fought on the side of the Catholic Confederation against the Dublin administration, and Abercorn and his relations, who also received land in the barony of Strabane, introduced Catholic settlers and a Jesuit community into his estates, converting a number of prominent settler women to Catholicism.11 Outside the formal plantation schemes Catholic settlers from the Isles of Scotland, such as Randall MacDonnell, first earl of Antrim, obtained a substantial estate comprising of almost three quarters of County Antrim, making him one of the six richest men in Ireland by 1640.12 Cases such as these have gone a long way to suggesting that deterministic links between ethnicity and confessional position are, at best, problematic. What made this situation unusual was that the confessional balance bore little resemblance to the ideal that underpinned the establishment of the Church of Ireland. While many European societies could boast a dissenting minority confession within the larger confessional state, Ireland was unusual in that the vast majority of the population of early modern Ireland did not share the confessional position of the head of state. Unfortunately, reliable numerical evidence for the size of 10 David Edwards, “ ‘A Haven of Popery’: English Catholic Migration to Ireland in the Age of Plantations” in Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds.), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, UK: 2005), 95–126. 11 Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland, 1625–32 (London: 1900), 499, 509, 513. 12 George Hill, A Historical Account of the Macdonnells of Antrim (Belfast: 1873), 195–202.
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Irish confessional groups is fragmentary and late. The guesses by early political economists, most notably William Petty, in the 1670s reckoned that there were some 300,000 Protestants in Ireland as opposed to 800,000 Catholics. Of the Protestants, Petty reckoned, 100,000 were members of the established church and 200,000 were dissenters, the latter split evenly between Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster and English radicals of various confessions in the remainder of the island.13 There are some grounds for suggesting that Petty’s estimates, particularly for the numbers of Protestant dissenters, say more about fears of the splits within Protestantism than about the real balance between confessional groups. However, there is no reason to doubt the reality that Catholics outnumbered Protestants by between two and three to one. This may even be an underestimate since commentators in the early-18th century believed that Catholics may have outnumbered Protestants by five or even seven to one. It is possible to consider the same reality from another position, that of the fate of the institutions of the various confessions in Ireland. Despite a good deal of historical research on the general positions of the churches in early modern Ireland, much less has been done in trying to describe how the institutions that the various confessions created fared within the legislative framework of the confessional state. Two examples might clarify the issues involved. In the case of Catholicism the high standard of record keeping by the Franciscans means that it is possible to chart with some precision the fate of their order in 17th-century Ireland. Despite a number of proclamations to expel the friars in the early-17th century, the size of the community in Ireland in 1623 was estimated at 200 friars, but by 1639 had grown to 574. Perhaps surprisingly, the number of friars seems to have fallen slightly to 400 by 1648, but this may reflect a poor guess about membership rather than reality. Certainly, the number of convents increased from 32, listed in a 1629 chapter bill, to 61, recorded in the 1647 chapter bill. By 1700 the size of the community had grown to 600 members.14 Growth was thus not even across the century, the impact of spurts of growth was ameliorated by periods of stagnation and, in the 1650s,
13 For a discussion of numbers, see Sean Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: 1992), 144–9, 159–61. 14 For these numbers and commentary on them, see Raymond Gillespie, “The Irish Franciscans, 1600–1700” in Edel Bhreathnach, Joseph MacMahon and John McCafferty (eds.), The Irish Franciscans, 1534–1990 (Dublin: 2009), 45–76.
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decline. Yet overall the Franciscans managed to grow substantially and reorganise within a confessional setting. From a Protestant perspective the evidence is less clear, partly because many affiliated to the dissenting tradition operated within a very weak organisational structure.15 However, those Presbyterians of Scottish extraction who settled in Ulster understood their ecclesiastical structures to be central to their understanding of the church. In the years after 1642, when the first presbytery was formed in Ulster, Presbyterians began creating in Ulster a system of church government more powerful and effective than that of the established church. By 1690 they had replicated the ecclesiastical structure of Scottish Presbyterianism in Ulster, drawing on the support of local communities of dissenters that the state admitted were impossible to suppress.16 As the Irish lord lieutenant, the duke of Ormond, expressed it, closing illegal Presbyterian churches “is no better than scattering a flock of crows that will soon assemble again, and possibly it were better to leave them alone than to let them see the impotence of the government upon which they will presume”.17 Examples such as this tend to reinforce the evidence of religious demography. However, they do suggest that the position is perhaps rather more complex than the simple figures of confessional allegiance indicate. The existence of large numbers of Catholic and Protestant non-conformists in 18th-century Ireland might simply point to the failure of the Reformation in the preceding two centuries, suggesting that the resulting multiconfessionalism was essentially the product of the failure of state-sponsored religious reform. However the evidence of the formation of institutional structures points to a rather different way of looking at the evidence. Multiconfessionalism was not simply the by-product of this failure, but rather a response to a series of confessional options that were offered within a weakly confessionalized structure. In this sense the disjunction between the apparent desire of the legislative framework to create a confessional state and the evolution of realities on the ground in
15 Raymond Gillespie, “Dissenters and Nonconformists” in Kevin Herlihy (ed.), The Irish Dissenting Tradition 1660–1800 (Dublin: 1995), 11–28. 16 Raymond Gillespie, “The Presbyterian Revolution in Ulster, 1660–90” in W. J. Shiels and Diana Wood (eds.), The Churches, Ireland and the Irish (Studies in Church History) 25 (Oxford: 1988), 159–70. 17 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde at Kilkenny Castle, new series, vol. 5 (London: 1902–20), 102.
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effect allowed the emergence of a multiconfessional society framed by a confessional state. Some modification of this picture may be necessary, since these descriptions of confessional balances need to be treated with care, if we are to understand the realities of multiconfessionalism that underlay these large aggregates. The 1732 hearth tax provides an important geographical perspective on the reality of multiconfessionalism.18 On a regional basis areas of what might be described as genuine multiconfessionalism can be identified, while other areas are, in fact, nearly monopolized by a single confession, albeit not that of the state. In the western province of Connacht some 91 per cent of households were returned as Catholic, ranging from some 95 per cent in the southern county of Galway to 81 per cent in Sligo in the north of the province. In the northern province of Ulster, by contrast, only 38 per cent of households returned themselves as Catholic, ranging from 43 per cent in the western county of Donegal to 19 per cent in the eastern county of Antrim. The remaining provinces of Leinster, in which Dublin lay, and Munster in the south of the country returned Catholic populations of 70 and 89 per cent respectively, but with some counties, such as Kerry, Clare, Kildare, and Waterford recording over 90 per cent Catholic inhabitants. Such distributions may be late evidence, but they almost certainly reflect earlier patterns of religious allegiances; indeed estimates for the proportion of Catholics in the various parts of Ireland in the mid-17th century should almost certainly be higher than those for 1732. The poll money return for 1660, for instance, suggests that in large areas of the west of the country settlers formed less than 5 per cent of the population and this is probably roughly proportionate to the number of Protestants.19 This sort of skewed geographical distribution should warn of the dangers of shaping general models of the operation of multiconfessionalism within even such a small, if exceptional, area as Ireland. While most of the western part of the country cannot be seen as conforming to the norms of the confessional state by conforming to the established church, neither can it be seen as multiconfessional, since the area was so heavily dominated by Catholics. Put another way, it is impossible to describe relations between Catholics 18
Mapped in Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, 146. Mapped in William J. Smyth, “Society and Settlement in Seventeenth-Century Ireland: The Evidence of the ‘1659’ Census” in William J. Smyth and Kevin Whelan (eds.), Common Ground: Essays on the Historical Geography of Ireland (Cork: 1988), 74. 19
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and Protestants in large parts of Ireland simply because there were virtually no Protestants to have relations with. Within the geographical and legal constraints of understanding the workings of multiconfessionalism there were some areas, most especially Ulster and Leinster, where multiple confessions did exist in close proximity and hence these regions approximate more closely to the idea of a multiconfessional society within a confessional state. To understand how this structure might have evolved, the forces that held it together, and the tensions that drove it apart, it is important to understand the factors that influenced confessional choice, the ways in which these multiple choices could be accommodated within the idea of the confessional state, the negotiations that made such accommodations possible and, finally, the consequences that ensued when these social negotiations broke down. Perhaps the most basic of these problems is that of confessional choice. In areas of multiconfessionalism a range of possible positions was on offer and, given weakening of the deterministic links between ethnicity, political positions, and religion discussed above, the reasons for the adoption of a particular confessional position are of some importance in understanding how confessions might relate to each other. There was clearly a wide range of factors at play in shaping confessional choice. Given the nature of the evidence much more is known of how adherents to the various varieties of Protestantism reached their own positions. A number of individuals, who have left indications of how they came to their own positions, may stand for much wider groups in early modern Irish society. The first is Eleanor Stringer, the wife of a carpenter in Cork. In 1642 when asked by a Catholic priest which religion she belonged to she replied “she was of that religion wherein she had been bred and would live and die”.20 The second, a Mr. Dean, was also from Cork. In 1645 when he asked some of the Irish Catholic rebels why he was being persecuted by them they answered “he was a Protestant and a Roundhead. He replied I take it upon my death I know not what those words mean but I am of the religion of both the king and the lord lieutenant general of Ireland profess which is the same Protestant religion and if I suffer I know not what I die for . . .”.21 The third individual is another woman, Mary Burrill, a member of a Godly
20 21
Trinity College, Dublin [hereafter TCD], MS 826, f. 244. TCD, MS 826, f. 299.
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congregation meeting in 1651 in the former Christ Church cathedral in Dublin. Speaking before the congregation she declared, “I have had in my dreams two terrible conflicts with Satan by all which I have been much assured of God’s love for that I always had the better, the victory. O, I love the saints of God, His Word, And all his ways, and I rest on Christ Jesus alone, and on nothing of self ! And I do desire your prayers to God for me to grow in grace etc”.22 In like manner Henry Blaney of Monaghan, a member of the established church, told Catholic insurgents in 1641 “I am of the true church and so assured of my salvation. That though you would spare my life yet I will not alter my faith”.23 A final example comes from some years later in 1686 as the Church of Ireland was only starting to come to terms with the Catholicism of the new king and head of that church, James II. Two members of the Irish gentry, both members of the Church of Ireland, Sir James Leigh and the Westmeath landowner Sir Henry Piers, were discussing religion and the ideas of Catholicism and those of their own church. Leigh suggested that saints and angels could intercede with God and should be prayed to. Piers replied that this was a ridiculous idea and claimed that saints and angels could not hear our prayers. Leigh retorted that “in this I [Piers] was contrary to my own divinity. I told him that I had never met with anything in any of our divines that would favour the doctrine”. He advanced the proposition based on Matthew 11:28 that Christ invited those who were burdened to come to Him for rest “but find not that he invites any to address in this case to his mother or any other saint”. He quoted Augustine to prove his case, but Leigh dismissed Augustine as a Catholic and replied with a text from Paul. The conversation on confessional doctrine collapsed in confusion, and both men agreed to consult a bishop when they were next in Dublin.24 A good deal can be gleaned from these cases, and from other similar exchanges that took place in early modern Ireland, about the process of making confessional choices and how those choices related to each other in a multiconfessional context. At the simplest they reveal a wide range of variables in shaping patterns of confessional choice. For Eleanor Stringer one’s religious position was dictated mainly by
22 23 24
John Rogers, Ohel or Beth Shemesh (London: 1653), 413. TCD, MS 834, f. 143. Armagh Public Library, Dopping MSS, no. 50.
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custom; for Mr. Dean it had overtones of political loyalty; while for Mary Burill it was a highly charged emotional experience. It is difficult to decide how these various motives may have worked in different people, but at least two general points might be drawn from these experiences. First, when lay men and women were asked what they believed, they did not naturally turn to the formulations of belief articulated by the institutional church. The creeds or the catechism, with which many must have been familiar, were not central in shaping their expressions of belief. Indeed when lay men and women entered theological discussion, they were not necessarily well prepared for it. The dialogue between Sir John Leigh and Henry Piers, two literate and well-informed Protestants, demonstrates this. Catholics too were wary of entering into the complexities of theology, preferring to leave that to the professionals. As the Catholic boatman from Wexford, Mathew Lamport, put it during his trial after the Baltinglass rising in 1580: “I do not know how to debate these things with you. I only want you to know that I am a Catholic and I believe in the faith of my holy mother the Catholic church”. This was not simply the ignorance of the lowly in the social order, since similar sentiments appear in the will of a Meath gentleman of the 1580s.25 Again, while works of religious controversy poured off the printing presses in England, with some 630 works during the reign of Elizabeth and another 764 in the reign of James I, the press in Dublin produced almost nothing.26 Theological controversy with Catholics was muted, and little made its way into the print.27 With Presbyterians there was almost no controversy. Before the 1640s emphasis was placed on common matters, and it is only after the 1690s that serious theological issues began to be debated in print.28 In general laymen and women did not think of confessional positions as discussable philosophical systems or even as collections of ideas.
25
Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester: 1997), 26. 26 Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age (London: 1977); Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age (London: 1978). 27 For example Declan Gaffney, “The Practice of Religious Controversy in Dublin, 1600–41” in W. J. Shiels and Diana Wood (eds.), The Churches, Ireland and the Irish (Studies in Church History) 25 (Oxford: 1989), 145–58. 28 Phil Kilroy, “Sermon and Pamphlet Literature in the Irish Reformed Church, 1613–34” in Archivium Hibernicum 33 (1975): 110–21; Raymond Gillespie, “Irish Print and Protestant Identity: William King’s Pamphlet Wars, 1687–97” in Vincent Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann (eds.), Taking Sides: Colonial and Confessional Mentalités in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: 2003), 231–51.
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They wanted to understand how their own positions affected daily life; personal and communal systems of religious thought were devised to be workable, not intellectually tidy, and were often validated by custom as much as by independent thought. Thus confessional positions that rested solely on ideas were weakly based and allowed leakage across confessional boundaries to create multiple confessional positions that might draw on common assumptions. A second conclusion that might be drawn from these examples is that at their heart confessional positions were understood as ways of comprehending the work of God in the world. Contemporaries described their experiences of God as “wonders” or the out-workings of God’s providence in their daily lives. Such events were not always easy to understand. In the confessional debate much of the action surrounded claim and counter-claim about on whose side God acted in time of war or in peace. Bible reading in the case of Protestants and preaching in the case of Catholics contributed to how they thought about the world, but they were often prepared to adopt perspectives that were not always the orthodox position of a well-defined confessional viewpoint. While Protestant clergy might condemn miracle stories as Catholic propaganda, there were many Protestants who felt that they had witnessed miracles in their everyday lives and held fast to those as the manifestation of God’s power in the world, whatever their clergy said. As a result confessional positions were often messy and the boundaries between them often permeable with practices sometimes associated with one group being used by another. Such confessional leakage is perhaps most clear in the use by Protestants of a Catholic devotion, such as visiting holy wells.29 Confessional choice was not, therefore, a simple matter, determined by ethnic or political inclinations alone, and in particular the experience of daily life was important in shaping how people thought about religion. Such understanding of the mechanics of confessional choice serves to highlight the variety of influences at work in shaping confessional positions. It also highlights the problem of how such confessional choices related to each other. While confessional positions could be
29 For this whole issue Gillespie, Devoted People, passim and for some further examples Raymond Gillespie, “Devotional Landscapes: God, Saints and the Natural World in Early Modern Ireland” in Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (eds.), God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World (Studies in Church History) 46 (Woodbridge: 2010), 217–36.
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influenced by political or customary considerations many were the result of everyday experience and hence were treated by contemporaries as fundamental decisions that affected their worlds. Thus confessional positions contained within themselves the potential to draw communities together but also to force them apart. The role of custom in determining religious allegiance, for instance, demonstrates the powerful forces at work for conformity within local communities. Custom, according to the early-17th century Irish attorney general Sir John Davies, “obtaineth the force of law [which is] the most perfect and most excellent and without comparison to best make and preserve a commonwealth”.30 Thus the local customary power of religion was held to be a very important bonding force in the local commonwealth and among particular social groups. Later in the century, William Petty’s comment that the religion of Catholics at the lower end of the social order was “rather a custom than a dogma among them” helps to explain something of the power of traditional Catholicism in Ireland that resisted the blandishments of both Reformation and CounterReformation into the 19th century.31 However, when local communities were pressured to make confessional choices, they often did so as a group rather than on an individual basis. Thus, for example, in 1606 a note on the reformation of religion in Ireland recorded that the bishop of Cork brought all his tenants to the local Church of Ireland church, while the bishop of Ferns observed that in parts of his diocese Catholics remained within that church because local landowners would not let land to member of other confessions.32 Thus the pressures within local commonwealths were for uniformity of confession to provide a common bond, but, since confessional adherence was determined by local political and experiential factors, such uniformity was not always attainable. Local communities grappled with the implications of confessional choice that both held communities together and drove them apart. Confessional relations did break down as the drive for local conformity exercised itself, most notably in the early weeks of the rising of 1641, but most of the 17th-century communities, where multiconfessionalism existed, devised mechanisms to contain the drive towards local confessionalization. 30
John Davies, Le primer report des cases & matters en ley resolves et adjudges en les courts del roy en Ireland (Dublin: 1615), preface. 31 William Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland (Dublin: 1691), 94–5. 32 For this point see Gillespie, Devoted People, 29–30.
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For those who lived in the local commonwealths of early modern Ireland the problem might have been formulated by two biblical texts: Matthew 10:34, which declared that “I come not to bring peace but a sword”, to be balanced against Luke 6:27 that required followers of Christ to “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you”. There was much to be said in favor of the latter if only because it created social order. To that end contemporaries of many confessional perspectives tried to find common cultural and social formations in their lives that could be made to co-exist within their differing confessional positions. Perhaps at the simplest almost all agreed that there was a God, that the king was his agent, and that hierarchy was the natural way in which society was organized. By the 16th century, some commentators emphasised the cultural diversity of Ireland, contrasting the Gaelic Irish, the new settlers, and the “middle nation” or Anglo-Irish (later Old English) descended from the medieval English settlers of Ireland. By the early part of the 17th century, however, there appeared to be a great deal of convergence as a result of commercialization, colonization, and both Tridentine and Protestant religious reformation.33 Thus when war broke out in 1641 it came as a shock to many contemporaries. The Catholic Old Englishman Richard Bellings began his history of the war by noting that the inhabitants of Ireland “(setting aside their different tenets in matters of religion) were as perfectly incorporated and as firmly knit together as frequent marriages, daily ties of hospitality and the mutual bond between lord and tenant could unite any people”. For Bellings the war of the 1640s was “a war of many parts, carried on under the notion of so many interests perplexed with such diversity of rents and divisions among those who seemed to be of a side”.34 These views were shared by the virulently Protestant Sir John Temple who began his own, very different, history of the 1640s with much the same sentiments.35 These linkages of marriage and sociability across confessional boundaries were clearly shaped in particular places and by specific agendas. In particular two sites emerged where people of varying confessional
33
Raymond Gillespie, Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: 2006), 6–7, 68–72. J. T. Gilbert (ed.), A History of Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland, vol. 1 (Dublin, 1882–91), p. 1. 35 John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (London: 1646), pt. 1, p. 14. For evidence of co-operation early in the war see Joseph Cope, England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion (Woodbridge: 2009), 32–75. 34
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backgrounds could meet and shape the structures of everyday life. The first of these was the institutions of the common law. While the legal structures were provided by the confessional state and could be used to enforce confessional conformity, local courts were also places that a great deal of everyday business was done at a very local level. Here Protestants and Catholics could meet on a regular basis in many parts of Ireland but not necessarily within a confessional agenda. We know little about such relationships, since they were so normal that they called for no comment until they went wrong. For instance, the Catholic Hugh MacMahon, one of the justices of the peace for Monaghan and a substantial landowner, became involved in the 1641 rising because, as he expressed it, one Fermanagh settler “gave him [MacMahon] not the right hand of friendship at the assize, he being also in the commission of the peace with him” and described the settler as “proud and haughty”.36 That Catholics and Protestants could hold local administrative office that required them to meet frequently is significant but called for little comment until the relationship broke down. Increasing involvement in the processes of the common law by the Gaelic Irish is also clear since the Irish language contains a significant number of early-17th-century borrowings of legal terminology.37 In the case of the Ulster plantation counties it is possible to trace the interaction of native and settler through legal institutions because of the survival, albeit fragmentary, of the records of some courts. Summonister rolls, for instance, record fines levied on large numbers of individuals, both native and settlers, as a result of actions at the quarter sessions. These include fines for non-attendance, and for ploughing by tail. Whole communities were fined for failing to maintain roads and bridges.38 Even clearer evidence of the engagement of the Catholic Irish with the law is provided by the few surviving jail delivery rolls of the assizes for Ulster from the second decade of the 17th century.39 By 36 Raymond Gillespie, “The Murder of Arthur Champion,” Clogher Record 14 (1991–3): 58–9. 37 For this wider context of legal borrowings see Liam Mac Mathúna, Béarla sa Ghaeilge (Dublin: 2007), 89–128 and Raymond Gillespie, “Negotiating Order in Early Seventeenth-Century Ireland” in Mike Braddick and John Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, UK: 2001), 195–204. 38 Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast, T/808/ 15090, 15120, 15126, 15130–5, 15139. 39 J. F. Ferguson (ed.), “The Ulster Roll of Gaol Delivery,” Ulster Journal of Archaeology 1st ser. i (1853): 260–70; ii (1854): 25–9; R. M. Young (ed.), Historical Notices of Old Belfast (Belfast: 1896), 30–9.
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this date it appears that the Irish were active players in the legal system both as accused and accuser. The rolls reveal the Irish as involved in theft, mainly of livestock, affray and, occasionally, rape. Grievances were resolved through the common law process. Perhaps the clearest evidence of the Irish understanding of the working of the law comes with the ability of bandits, or woodkerne, to manipulate the process of obtaining legal pardons for themselves. Some used intermediaries, such as landlords, to obtain pardons for their activities, but others managed to acquire multiple pardons for themselves, suggesting that they were at home with the legal system that granted these and were adept at using it for their own ends. In other cases what appears to have been groups of woodkerne offered to go bail for another, usually resulting in additional woodkerne activity.40 Again, familiarity with the workings of the law is suggested in the early weeks of the rising of 1641 by the fact that some of those who seized castles gained admission by asking for warrants for thefts as pretext for gaining entry.41 At an even lower level in the hierarchy of legal institutions, both Catholics and Protestants met to resolve very local problems in manorial courts, which enforced local customary law. The records of these institutions have only survived in a very patchy form, but those for the archbishop of Armagh’s lands between 1625 and 1627 are preserved. Admittedly this was an unusual sort of estate and, since it was owned by the church under the plantation scheme for Ulster, was allowed to take Irish tenants. The overwhelming majority of the litigants in the archbishop’s manorial court had Irish names, and among the members of the juries about a third bore Irish names, the majority of whom were almost certainly confessionally Catholic.42 The sort of cases in which they were involved, mainly assaults and slander, were perhaps typical of local societies grappling with the difficulties of minor rule breaking and local anti-social behaviour and turning to a local common law framework to resolve these. One further set of manorial records, for County Clare in the second half of the 17th century confirms the pattern indicated by the Armagh courts. Here too both Catholics and Protestants, although the evidence for confessional positions is based on
40 British Library, Add MS 3827, f. 41; Raymond Gillespie, Conspiracy: Ulster Plots and Plotters in 1615 (Belfast: 1987), 36–7, 41. 41 TCD, MS 839, f. 40; MS 835, f. 26v. 42 T. G. F. Paterson, “The Armagh Manor Court Rolls, 1625–7,” Seanchas Ardmhacha 2 (1956–7): 301–9.
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ethnic background indicated by surnames, appear to have co-operated to resolve a whole range of local problems with no confessional overtones such as debt, disorder, and trespass.43 The importance of law in this process of maintaining local relations is particularly clear from the way it was used in a confessional context. In the early-17th century, Catholic clergy used the same civil law processes that were used to enforce adherence to the laws establishing the Church of Ireland to sue their parishioners for the payment of ecclesiastical dues and to take their own bishops to law if they did not agree with his decisions.44 A second mechanism in providing common linkages that allowed a number of confessions to co-exist was, paradoxically, the fundamental unit of the established church: the parish. Like the local evidence for the workings of courts, the evidence for the workings of the Church of Ireland parish in the 17th century is thin with few parochial records surviving before the latter half of the century. However, some case studies are suggestive. In the aftermath of an abortive rising in Ulster in 1615 one Cnougher McGilpatrick O’Mullan, a leaseholder from the Haberdasher’s company in County Londonderry, gave a deposition about his very marginal involvement in the conspiracy. In the course of the deposition another episode was recounted that appears to have had nothing to do with the plot. A dispute between Art McTomlen O’Mullen and Brian McShane O’Mullen became violent and “the said Art uttered these speeches to the said Brian saying ‘Thou art a churchwarden and yet dost not attend thy office according to thy instructions. Thou had sixteen Masses said in thy house by Gillecome McTeige, abbot, to whom thou gavest a white cow for his service and then relievest the said Gillecome and harbourest him in thy house as well as abroad”.45 A good deal of the detail here is vague. The identity of Gillecome McTeige is unclear but he may have been the abbot of the recently dissolved Cistercian house at nearby Coleraine and he may have been living off local charity. The number of Masses suggests that McTeige may have been invited to fulfil some specific task, such as a request in a will for a specific number of post-mortem Masses. Whatever the
43 S. C. O’Mahony (ed.), “The Manor Courts of the Earl of Thomond, 1666–86,” Analecta Hibernica 38 (2004): 135–222; Raymond Gillespie, “Finavarra and its Manor Court in the 1670s,” The Other Clare 25 (2001): 45–9. 44 Brian Mac Cuarta, Catholic Revival in the North of Ireland, 1603–41 (Dublin: 2007), 121–3. 45 Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1615–25, 54–5.
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problems with the details of this evidence, its main thrust is clear: in the very early stages of the plantation process churchwardens of the established church were not necessarily subscribers to the confession of the established church, although they clearly wished to be part of the structure that they did not perceive to be significantly different to what had preceded it. This may not be as strange as first appears, given that before the canons of 1634 there was no requirement for parochial officials to subscribe to any doctrinal statements and, in practice, this does not appear to have been enforced until after the restoration of the Church of Ireland as the established church in 1660. Given the close linkages between parish and society before the 17th century, it would only be normal that the native population would wish to maintain links with their own parish and to maintain burial and other rights in the parish graveyard. This implies among at least some Catholics an ability to differentiate between the idea of the parish as a building block of local society and the parish as a religious community and to participate in one without the other. This has certainly been revealed by studies of parish life in much better documented areas of Ireland. In areas such as Crumlin, on the outskirts of Dublin, for instance, Church of Ireland churchwardens continued to be appointed during the 17th century in a parish that was largely Catholic.46 Similarly, in St. John’s parish in Dublin city, a number of Catholics can be identified holding office in the Church of Ireland parish.47 In the later-17th century Catholic parochial officials at lesser levels can be identified, and, in St Catherine’s parish in Dublin, Presbyterians and Quakers can be found holding parochial offices for which they did not have to take oaths, most importantly surveyors of the highways and collectors of the poor rate.48 Such offices were marks of local distinction that were important in a socially volatile society in which immigration had broken traditional networks that often determined a man’s place in the world. A rapid social rise needed to be underpinned by the sort of marks of approbation that parochial office conferred, and thus such office was sought by individuals of all confessional backgrounds. 46 Raymond Gillespie, “Godly Order: Enforcing Peace in the Irish Reformation” in Elizabethanne Boran and Crawford Gribben (eds), Enforcing Reformation in Ireland and Scotland, 1550–1700 (Farnham: 2006), 200–1. 47 Gillespie, “Urban Parishes,” 238–40; Raymond Gillespie (ed.), The Vestry Records of the Parish of St John the Evangelist, Dublin, 1595–1658 (Dublin: 2002), 12–3. 48 Raymond Gillespie (ed.), The Vestry Records of the Parishes of St Catherine’s and St James, Dublin (Dublin: 2004), 14–5.
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The mechanisms to maintain local peace in early modern Ireland were remarkably successful in their operation. They could be effective in a rather limited way. In the early 1620s, for instance, Lord Deputy Falkland decided to enforce some of the anti-Catholic legislation that had fallen into disuse. He instructed sheriffs to present recusants at the next assizes, but no sooner had he done this than he received a letter from the Catholic countess of Kildare complaining of his actions. The result was the withdrawal of all the writs against her tenants, Falkland informing the sheriff this was “for reasons best known to ourself ”. Thereafter relations between the two parties were more circumspect. Complaining to the Protestant earl of Thomond, he observed that one Catholic bishop was becoming bold in exercising his episcopal functions but was careful not explicitly to prohibit him from doing so, stipulating that Catholics “may be contained within the bounds of moderation as formerly they were”.49 Such accommodations were clearly tenuous and when subjected to economic, social, and political pressures, sometimes generated from outside, they frequently collapsed, resulting in a local drive for confessional conformity. This breakdown was not inevitable and usually took place in local contexts and in particular circumstances and ensured that the consequences of the breakdown of local relations would often have unusual features. Specific events, such as funerals, could provide local flash points, because they were the focus of liturgical actions that were not only deeply contested but could have repercussions for the soul of the deceased.50 Perhaps the most widespread collapse of multiconfessional relations occurred in the late months of 1641 and the early months of 1642, as growing political and economic instability erupted into local warfare across Ireland. Those who lived through those early months of the rising and reported their experiences to commissioners later described a breakdown not only of the local structures of government but also of the local structures of accommodation that allowed multiconfessionalism to exist. Catholic majorities in various parts of Ireland pressured smaller Protestant communities to conform to the majority, usually signalling this by attendance at Mass. In Westmeath, it was claimed that one of the insurgents had claimed “that none should live in Ireland 49
Charles McNeill, “Rawlinson Class C,” Analecta Hibernica 2 (1931): 14–15, 17. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report of the Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont, vol. 1 (London: 1905–9), 33; Calendar of State Papers, Ireland, 1615–25, 429–30. 50
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but such as would go to Mass”.51 Protestants were urged to attend Mass for various reasons. Some were offered protection if they did so.52 When John Cook in County Leitrim attended Mass his looted property was returned to him and in Kilkenny similar promises were made.53 In other cases more violent encouragements were offered to induce individuals and families to go to Mass. Some were imprisoned because they refused.54 Threats were made to make individuals convert, and, in Mayo, John Goldsmith, the Church of Ireland vicar of Burrishoole, claimed that “the younger priests and friars demanded of Stephen Lynch, prior of Strade, in this deponent’s own hearing if it were not lawful to kill this deponent because he would not turn to Mass which prior answered them that it was as lawful for them to kill this deponent as to kill a sheep or a dog”. 55 In New Ross in County Wexford, some Protestants were brought to the town with “ropes around their necks to hang them if they would not turn to mass”.56 How many of these threats were actually carried out is unclear, and only a few were reported as having been executed for failing to go to Mass.57 This sort of return to a single confessional norm for a community was not restricted to the living. Throughout Ulster and also around Kildare in north Leinster, the recently buried corpses of Protestants were disinterred because, it was claimed, they profaned parish churches that had been seized by Catholics for their own use.58 Custom was not the only factor at work here, for some of the other motives examined above that shaped confessional positions also appeared among the testimonies of the deponents. One man in Kerry, for instance, was told “that he must be a papist for the king is one”. Again, in Monaghan, it was believed that the viceroy and judges were all Catholics. In Waterford, one man believed that the forged royal commission, by which the insurgents claimed royal approbation for their actions, commanded “the extirpation and utter rooting out of all English Protestants in the kingdom of
51
TCD, MS 817, f. 2v. TCD, MS 815, ff. 41v 115v. 53 TCD, MS 831, ff. 11, 36; MS 812, f. 239, MS 811, f. 88; MS 837, ff. 9v, 18, MS 813, f. 2; MS 812, f. 27v. 54 TCD, MS 832, f. 66v. 55 TCD, MS 831, ff. 151 (Goldsmith), 268. 56 TCD, MS 818, f. 24v. 57 TCD, MS 816, f. 179; MS 817, f. 180. 58 For examples, TCD, MS 832, ff. 84v, 105, 120; MS 835, f. 20v; MS 813, ff. 260–60v. 52
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Ireland that would not conform themselves to the church of Rome”.59 How many Protestants responded to these demands to convert cannot be ascertained with any degree of accuracy, but deponents certainly reported that a number did, including a few Church of Ireland ministers.60 In one case the conversion was brief, since in Monaghan a number of those who went to Mass had their throats cut “before they could become heretics again”.61 While there is little doubt about the collapse of local structures that made multiconfessionalism possible, that collapse needs to be balanced against particular instances, where structures had allowed sufficiently strong personal relationships to be built up to transcended more general forces. In Galway, one man was helped to escape from the clutches of the Catholic rebels by a Catholic “to whom this deponent had done some former courtesies”. In County Meath, at the outbreak of hostilities, one wealthy British Protestant gave his goods to a Catholic friend for safekeeping. Such instances testify to the importance of the values of good neighborliness, codes of honour, and a flexibility of conviviality that determined the limits of controversy even when the normal support structures for such a world lay in tatters. While there was certainly a local drive towards Catholic confessional unity in areas where Catholicism was the majority confession before the rising, there were also other moves towards uniformity. In east Ulster, where Presbyterianism was becoming increasingly organized in the early 1640s, a similar process was under way. Local Presbyterian meetings began to act in the same way as the established Church of Ireland had tried to do before 1640. They created parishes and the kirk session assumed the function of social discipline for all those living within the bounds of the parishes. In Templepatrick parish, prominent Presbyterians were instructed to ensure that the Catholic Irish came to church, and the kirk session summoned a number of people with Irish names before it. While their confessional position cannot be proven, it seems highly likely that those summoned were Catholics. The drive for local conformity seems to have had its origin in the collapse of the 59
TCD, MS 828, f. 280v; MS 834, f. 88; MS 820, f. 261v. TCD, MS 817, f. 5v; MS 820, ff. 44, 46v 186, 239; MS 821, ff. 67, 69; MS 831, ff. 147, 162; MS 816, ff. 113, 128; MS 831, f. 100; MS 818, ff. 10v, 18v; MS 829, ff. 138v 209, 221, 252, 262, 273, 319v; MS 814, ff. 56, 81v; MS 813, f. 360v; MS 815, ff. 25, 70v, 34v; MS 830, f. 22, MS 812, f. 66v, 193v; MS 811, ff. 34, 158; MS 812 ff. 19, 21, 66v; MS 829, ff. 41v, 52, 59. 61 TCD, MS 834, f. 85v and for a similar case in King’s County, MS 814, f. 57. 60
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legal and parochial structures, discussed above, that created at least some of the bridges that made multiconfessionalism possible. As a result, new ways of organizing local life needed to be created in the wake of war, and the Presbyterian church and its structures provided a coherent and effective way of achieving this.62 Ireland in the early modern period provides something of an enigma in European terms. It was one of the few states in which the religion of the ruler and the religion of the people failed to coincide. And it was not a minority of the population of Ireland that failed to conform, but rather the majority. Thus Ireland became a multiconfessional society framed by all the structures of a confessional state. This was not an accidental situation, created by the failure of the reformation process, but rather it existed because individuals made choices about belief and practice informed by politics, custom, and experience. That those two ideas could co-exist, and even at times feed off each other, suggests that a majority devoted at least some time and effort to shaping a drive for peace and order that existed in tension with the desire to enforce religious reform of either the Catholic or Protestant variety. The relative abundance of resources in early modern Ireland, reflected in a low population to land ratio, together with a rapidly commercializing economy, helped to defuse, though not eliminate, some of the potential flashpoints in that world. This, for instance, may help to explain why about 20 per cent of the membership of the overtly Catholic guild of St Audoen, which supported Catholic clergy, was made up of Protestants who presumably hoped to benefit from the wealth of the guild.63 Similar socio-economic factors may also explain why Ireland escaped the witch craze that swept 16th- and early-17th-century Europe. However, economics will not explain other anomalies. For instance, the government clearly knew the location of most of the Catholic Mass houses in the 17th century and those of dissenters in the later 17th century, yet the authorities did little to close down any of these, and when they acted did so only sporadically. At least one Jesuit house was located within yards of the diocesan cathedral of Dublin, but it was allowed
62 Raymond Gillespie, “Scotland and Ulster: a Presbyterian perspective, 1603–1700” in W. P. Kelly and J. R. Young (eds.), Scotland and the Ulster Plantation (Dublin: 2009), 96–102. 63 Colm Lennon, “The Chantries and the Irish Reformation: The Case of St. Anne’s Guild, Dublin, 1550–1630” in R. V. Comerford, Mary Cullen, Jacqueline Hill and Colm Lennon (eds.), Religion, Conflict and Coexistence in Ireland (Dublin: 1990), 22.
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to operate for some years before being closed. Again the Church of Ireland knew a good deal about Catholics and their business. In 1637 one Catholic priest described his church and vestments in his will, which was then proved in the testamentary court of the Protestant archbishop of Dublin.64 All this suggests a more considered attitude and an awareness that religious change was not a set of binary oppositions, but a set of social relationships traversed by a series of potential fracture lines that responded to both conflict and conciliation. The reality of the existence of multiconfessionalism within a confessional state is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in a story about Humphrey Thompson, the Presbyterian minister of Ballybay in Monaghan from 1696 until 1744. According to a later memoir that appears to draw from a still earlier account, possibly written by Thompson himself: coming into the congregation of Ballybay and finding his parishioners so jealously and bigotedly attached to hold their neighbours of other persuasions pretty much on a par with them on this head [bigotry], he immediately set out about reforming this great abuse by closely attaching himself of a worthy clergyman of the Church of England . . . who afforded him every assistance in the prosecution of his scheme . . . they proceeded so far as to effect the most peaceful harmony and good will among their parishioners which produced intermarriages and such connections that on the absence of either clergyman from their congregations on a Sunday that the other generally filled with his parishioners. By their joint management of the popish priest ... they put a stop to the violent antipathies to the people of that persuasion and the murders, bloodshed and thefts that were too common and frequently committed by papists by way of retaliation.65
Thompson was clearly an unusual figure, although the sort of links he established with the Church of Ireland may be more common than historians tend to accept. In Antrim town in the 1670s, for instance, Presbyterians shared the parish church building with the established church.66 However, Thompson’s actions may only be a much more transparent version of the sort of calculations that many in early modern Ireland made. For them muticonfessionalism was not an idea of
64
For discussion and references, see Gillespie, “Godly order,” 190. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng hist d 155, ff 27v–8. 66 J. S. Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, vol. 1 (London: 1853), 138; Phil Kilroy, Protestant Dissent and Controversy in Ireland, 1660–1714 (Cork: 1994), 27–8. 65
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virtuous toleration but a practice of survival in a world where power was concentrated in the hands of one confessional group who might use it or restrain themselves from exercising it as conditions permitted. The decisions of early modern Irish people, based on experience, were intended to smooth the problems of daily life, to bring peace as much as the sword, by using law and local interests to hold together the divisive forces of custom, politics, and belief that characterized confessional choice.
EUROPEAN MULTICONFESSIONALISM AND THE ENGLISH TOLERATION CONTROVERSY, 1640–1660 John Coffey Old-fashioned histories of toleration typically assumed that “ideas rule the world”.1 As a result, they gave pride of place to a heroic line of progressive thinkers from Castellio to Voltaire who condemned persecution and argued for intellectual and religious freedom. In recent years, however, historians of toleration have started to “play down the power of ideas”.2 Intellectual history, which was once central to accounts of “the rise of toleration”, is now being displaced by the political and (especially) social history of religious coexistence.3 This historiographical shift is an important corrective to the overly idealist (and idealised) scholarship of earlier generations, for it gives us a sophisticated insight into the actual practice of tolerance and intolerance in states and communities across Europe. However, it raises questions. How do the old and the new history of toleration relate to each other, if at all. Is intellectual history now passé? Or should we be exploring the interface between early modern practice and early modern theory?4 Judith Pollman has suggested that this is the way forward. She wonders if the practice of coexistence was “the catalyst for new ideas on religious uniformity”, and whether “the everyday experience of living with
1 Perez Zagorin says just that in How the Idea of Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: 2003), 12. 2 The phrase is Alexandra Walsham’s in Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: 2006), 8. Walsham herself is ambivalent on the power of ideas. On the one hand, she argues that ‘the early modern ideology of religious intolerance . . . exerted enormous influence at the end of the 17th century, no less than at the beginning of the 16th’ (p. 49). The case for toleration, by contrast, is assumed to be largely ineffectual “outside the circles of the literate intellectuals who articulated it” (p. 238). 3 The best synthesis of this new scholarship is Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2007). 4 For further reflections on the historiography, see my “Milton, Locke and the new history of toleration,” Modern Intellectual History, 5 (2008): 619–32.
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pluralism” caused “an intellectual orientation away from the Augustinian imperative compelle intrare”.5 In this essay, I want to address such questions and bridge the gap between theory and practice by considering what participants in the English toleration controversy had to say about the multiconfessional polities of continental Europe. Surprisingly, perhaps, this has received little attention from historians. It is a commonplace that the Dutch republic was exhibit A for tolerationists, and some historians think that pragmatic arguments for toleration based on “reason of state” were more persuasive and important than philosophical or theological arguments.6 Yet studies of tolerationist texts tend to concentrate on the latter, and there has been no sustained examination of English appeals to European religious diversity. By focussing on England’s first major toleration controversy—the one that raged during the Puritan Revolution of the mid-17th century—we should be able to explore the uses of European multiconfessionalism.7 European Example in English Debate Perhaps the first thing to note is how little English tolerationists referred to the multiconfessional polities of continental Europe. At its debates over toleration in Whitehall in December 1648, the New Model Army and its clerical supporters concentrated overwhelmingly on philosophical, theological, and biblical arguments, and only one
5
Judith Pollman, “Getting along,” History Workshop Journal, 64 (2007): 423. Henry Kamen asserts that “Trade was usually a stronger argument than religion”. See Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (London: 1967), 224–27, quotation at 224. For a theoretical defence of the priority of political (and economic) factors see Anthony Gill, The Political Origins of Religious Liberty (Cambridge, UK: 2008). 7 For overviews of this controversy, see W. K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 1932–40), vols. III and IV; B. Worden, “Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate” in W. J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration (Oxford: 1984), 199–233; Andrew Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (State College, PA: 2001), ch. 3; Sebastian Barteleit, Toleranz und Irenik: Politisch-Religiose Grenzsetzungen im England der 1650er Jahre (Mainz: 2003); Zagorin, How the Idea of Toleration Came to the West, ch. 6; John Coffey, “The toleration controversy” in C. Durston and J. Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester: 2006), ch. 2. None of these accounts offers an extended analysis of how tolerationists and their critics argued over European multiconfessionalism. 6
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short reference was made to the Dutch practice of toleration.8 In a series of pamphlets against religious uniformity, the Leveller William Walwyn made only the briefest of comments about pluralism in the Netherlands and elsewhere.9 In his lengthy treatise, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, Roger Williams made just a single fleeting reference to toleration in the United Provinces. The great bulk of this work was devoted to deconstructing the biblical arguments for uniformity. As he explained: “[S]o great a waeight of this controversie lyes upon this president of the Old Testament”.10 Anti-tolerationists, like the Covenanter Samuel Rutherford, shared the view that biblical and theological issues were at the heart of the controversy. Rutherford’s A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (1649), has been described by Owen Chadwick as “the ablest defence of persecution in the 17th century”,11 but in a treatise of more than 400 pages, Rutherford never so much as mentioned multiconfessionalism in contemporary Europe. By contrast, he devoted entire chapters to the exegesis of specific biblical passages, like the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. In 17th-century Christendom, as in 21st-century Islam, much hung on the interpretation of sacred texts.12 Toleration controversies involved a battle for the Bible. Because this was a battle no one could afford to lose, it absorbed far more polemical energy than the race to find current examples of successful (or unsuccessful) regimes of toleration. Most advocates of toleration mentioned European religious pluralism only in passing—it was not a major plank of their case, and no one elaborated at length on Dutch, French, or Central and Eastern European arrangements. But it would be a mistake to dismiss tolerationist pamphleteers as abstract theorists with little interest in the practicalities of power. On
8 A. S. P. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–49) from the Clarke Manuscripts (London: 1992), 125–78; reference to the Netherlands on 138. 9 J. R. McMichael and B. Taft (eds.), The Writings of William Walwyn (Athens, GA: 1986), 57, 114, 161. 10 [Roger Williams], The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), 160, 179. As we shall see, Williams made more reference to the Netherlands in later writings. 11 Owen Chadwick, The Reformation (Harmondsworth: 1964), 403. 12 For the scriptural character of modern Islamic debates over blasphemy law, see Abdullah Saeed and Hassan Saeed, Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam (Aldershot: 2004).
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the contrary, they were often immersed in local and national politics.13 Throughout the 1640s, the merchant William Walwyn was an activist for the Parliamentarians, the Independents, and then the Levellers.14 Sir Henry Vane the Younger had been the Governor of Massachusetts during the Antinomian Controversy, and though that turned out badly, he re-emerged in the 1640s as one of the most capable administrators in the House of Commons, playing a key role in running the navy.15 Vane’s friend Roger Williams was in London to gain a charter for the fledgling colony of Rhode Island and exploited his high level connections to outmaneuver Massachusetts.16 John Goodwin was a London pastor, but he and his congregation were in the thick of City politics, supporting the Independent faction through printing, petitioning, spying, and sitting on key bodies like Common Council and the Militia Committee.17 Henry Robinson was a merchant, a member of the Hartlib circle, and an enthusiastic promoter of practical schemes of improvement.18 As practical men who wished to get things done, these tolerationists could not afford to ignore the standard early modern assumption that religious unity was fundamental to political stability.19 Protestant England was a confessional state, and most early Stuart commentators agreed that withdrawal from the national church was effectively withdrawal from the commonwealth itself. “Religion being the chief band of human society”, wrote Sir Francis Bacon, “it is a happy thing when itself is well contained within the true band of unity”.20 The membership of church and state was conceived as coextensive. “There is not any man of the Church of England,” wrote Richard Hooker, “but the same man is also a member of the commonwealth; nor any man a 13 For what follows, see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as well as the sources listed. 14 See references in K. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot: 1997). 15 His career as a Parliamentarian politician is ably explored in V. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger: A Study in Political and Administrative History (London: 1970). 16 His career is best followed through Glenn La Fantasie (ed.), The Correspondence of Roger Williams 2 vols. (Hanover, NH: 1988). 17 See John Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution (Woodbridge: 2006). 18 The fullest study of Robinson remains W. K. Jordan’s Whiggish monograph, Men of Substance: A Study of the Thought of Two English Revolutionaries, Henry Parker and Henry Robinson (Chicago: 1942). 19 See Conrad Russell, “Arguments for religious unity in England, 1530–1650,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 18 (1967): 201–26. 20 Francis Bacon, “Of unity in religion,” Essays (London: 1992), 8.
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member of the commonwealth, which is not also of the Church of England.”21 The Puritan divines who preached before Parliament in the 1640s echoed this sentiment. “Schism in the church, begets a Schism in the State,” averred Matthew Newcomen. “Divisions whether they be Ecclesiasticall or Politicall in Kingdomes, Cities and Families, are infallible causes of ruin,” claimed the Presbyterian Edmund Calamy.22 One way to respond to this charge was to turn it around, by blaming intolerant regimes for fomenting religious wars. The Leveller, Richard Overton, produced a satirical tract purporting to describe the trial of “Mr Persecution”. The witnesses against him included “Mr Blood-ofPrinces”, “Mr Desolate-Germany”, and “Mr Domestick-Miseries”.23 Tolerationists frequently blamed heavy-handed Laudian bishops for provoking the conflict that led to civil war. Williams called the idea of forced uniformity a “State-killing doctrine”.24 Another pamphleteer asked: “What blood, confusions, strifes and contentions, hath compulsion brought forth? All wars, tumults, almost every where, have arisen from this spirit of violence and compulsion. Hence the Papist persecutes the Protestant, and the Protestant the Papist. Hence the Turkes opposeth the Christian, the Christian the Turke”.25 But pointing to the political chaos wrought by religious coercion was insufficient. Tolerationists also needed to show that their proposals were compatible with stable and flourishing states. Thus among his witnesses against “Mr Persecution”, Overton included “Mr Unity-ofKingdomes”, “Mr National-Strength”, “Mr Setled Peace”, “Mr Humaine Society”, “Mr Publique Good”, and “Mr National-Wealth”. The case against the accused was forcefully put by “Mr State Policie”: “[W]ere the devouring principle of persecution weeded out from betwixt all Religion, they might all enjoy their publike safety to the generall enlargement and strengthening of politike power . . .”26 Arguments from “reason of state” or national interest were one important component of the case for toleration. Alongside general arguments for the viability of pluralistic states, tolerationists offered concrete examples. Often they pointed to ancient 21
Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, VIII.i.2. Cited in an Anglican compilation of Puritan testimonies: Toleration Disapprov’d and Condemn’d (1670), 43, 33. 23 [Richard Overton], The Arraignement of Mr Persecution (1645), 5–6. 24 Roger Williams, Mr Cottons Letter . . . Examined and Answered (1644), 6. 25 Freedom of Religious Worship (1654), 17. 26 Overton, The Arraignement of Mr Persecution, 4–5, 29. 22
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cases of peaceful coexistence. The Hebrew patriarchs had lived peacefully among Egyptians, Philistines, and Hittites. The Jewish nation at the time of Christ had accommodated various sects: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes. The Roman Empire was religiously pluralistic, and it was under this regime that Christianity first thrived.27 But advocates of toleration also turned to contemporary examples. It was here that multiconfessional polities became very pertinent. A number of writers suggested that Christian Europe would do well to learn from the Ottoman Turks, who had found ways peacefully to accommodate religious difference.28 But it was more common to cite the experience of Christian states. Henry Robinson covered all angles, pointing to the religious freedom granted to minorities by the United Provinces, “a Popish French King”, and “an unbelieving Turk”.29 Roger Williams listed “the Cities of Holland, Poland, or Turkie” as places where there was “some freedome”, and where adherents of different religions “were commingled in civil cohabitation and commerce together”.30 The Baptist Christopher Blackwood noted that Poland and Holland permitted diversity of religion “with no small benefit to the publike peace”.31 When the Scottish Presbyterian Adam Stewart claimed that there was “no State in Christendome, where there is one onely Religion established, that will admit the publick exercise of any other”, John Goodwin retorted that this was “manifestly untrue, as is notoriously knowne in France, the Low Countries &c”.32 The author of Liberty of Conscience Asserted (1649) cited the tolerance of religious dissenters in Holland, France, Germany, and Switzerland, adding that the Dutch Reformed tolerated the idolatrous inhabitants of their colonies in the East Indies.33 In the epic parliamentary debates over the blasphemy of the Quaker James Nayler, one of the few voices raised in his defense was that of the Baptist Major-General Packer. Packer
27
See, for example, Overton, The Arraignement of Mr Persecution, 31; Samuel Richardson, The Necessity of Toleration (1647), 20. 28 See Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge, UK: 1998), 103–7; Nabil Matar, “The Toleration of Muslims in Renaissance England” in John Christian Laursen (ed.), Religious Toleration: “The Variety of Rites” from Cyrus to Defoe (London: 1999), 129–31; Gerald Maclean, “Milton, Islam and the Ottomans” in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration (Oxford: 2007), 285–90. 29 [Henry Robinson], John the Baptist, or Liberty of Conscience (1644), sig. A4r. 30 Williams, The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy (1652), 166. 31 Christopher Blackwood, The Storming of Antichrist (1644), 17. 32 John Goodwin, M. S. to A. S. or Liberty of Conscience (1644), 87. See also 108. 33 Liberty of Conscience Asserted (1649), 5–6.
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declared that the duty of Parliament was “to give every man his native liberty, which is given in Holland, Poland, and other countries, a free exercise of their consciences”.34 Some tolerationists had first hand knowledge of these lands, and it is tempting to speculate that travel had broadened their minds.35 Sir Henry Vane and John Milton had been on the Grand Tour, but while this exposed them to a cosmopolitan humanist culture, it also cemented their lifelong hostility to Tridentine Catholicism, and their tolerationist works in this period make no admiring references to European examples.36 Henry Robinson, by contrast, did emphasize the peaceful religious diversity in other lands, something he had witnessed himself as a merchant who had worked abroad as a factor for his father. He was well informed about the scope and limits of religious tolerance in Holland, France, Spain, Italy, and Turkey. Roger Williams had lived up close and personal with Native Americans, and his largely positive interactions with pagan Algonquians underpinned a sense of common humanity and mutual respect for people of other faiths.37 Even tolerationists who had no experience of foreign travel were keen to acquire information about the religious toleration practiced on continental Europe. William Walwyn expressed some scorn for those who travelled abroad, but he acquired a smattering of cosmopolitan learning through vernacular translations of Montaigne and the classics and was an admirer of the Dutch.38 John Goodwin, who (as far as we know) never ventured beyond London and East Anglia, explained that he had learned about religious diversity abroad “in report from persons of good esteem and worth, who have been eye-witnesses and
34
J. T. Rutt Esq. (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Burton vol. 1 (London: 1828), 100. For contrasting perspectives on this claim, see John Christian Laursen, “Irony and Toleration: Lessons from the Travels of Mendes Pinto,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 6 (2003): 21–40; James Ellison, George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century (London: 2002); Joy Charnley, Pierre Bayle: Reader of Travel Literature (Berlin: 1998). 36 See [Henry Vane Jr.] Zeal Examined (1652); John Milton, Areopagitica, A Speech of Mr John Milton for unlicens’d Printing (1644); J[ohn] M[ilton], A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659). Vane, however, did think that England could emulate the Dutch republic by flourishing as a ‘free state’: See Diary of Thomas Burton, III, 173–80. 37 See Williams, A Key into the Language of America (1643). See also P. Rubertone, Grave Undertakings: Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Washington, DC: 2001), and M. Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: 2008), ch. 2: “Living Together: The Roots of Respect”. 38 The Writings of William Walwyn, 50. 35
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diligent observers of such things, both in the Low-Countries and in France”.39 A number of writers wrote admiringly of the French example. “States lose nothing,” wrote one Independent, “by preserving the Liberties of men’s consciences”. “In France,” he continued, “the Protestants are accounted the best Subjects, they are tolerated contrary to the publike Government of the State, yet are not inconsistent with the well being and flourishing condition of it”.40 Henry Robinson agreed. In mixed company, French Protestants were typically outnumbered by their Catholic compatriots, but the Catholics “are so temperate and discreet, that it is held an unseemly and uncivill part, for a Papist to aske an other what Religion he is of ”, lest the Protestants should feel intimidated. In England, however, it was sadly acceptable “to reproach one an other with the nick-name of Puritan or Separatist, Presbyterian or Independent”.41 The Anglican tolerationist Jeremy Taylor also appealed to the recent history of France in making the prudential case for a multiconfessional state:42 the experience which Christendom hath had in this last Age is Argument enough, that Toleration of differing opinions is so farre from disturbing the publick peace, or destroying the interest of Princes and CommonWealths, that it does advantage to the publick, it secures peace . . . When France fought against the Huguenots, the spilling of her own blood was argument enough of the imprudence of that way of promoting Religion; but since she hath given permission to them, the world is witnesse how prosperous she hath been ever since.43
39
John Goodwin, Innocencie and Truth Triumphing Together (1645), 54. See also Goodwin, Theomachia, or the Grand Imprudence of Men Fighting Against God (1644), 23, where he explains that he has been ‘credibly informed’ about the Dutch situation. 40 A Moderate Answer to Mr Prins Full Reply (1645), 40. 41 [Henry Robinson], Liberty of Conscience (1644), 40–1. 42 On Anglican Royalists and toleration, see G. Burgess, “Royalism and liberty of conscience in the English Revolution” in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (eds.), Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900 (Exeter: 2008), ch. 1; Nicholas McDowell, “The ghost in the marble: Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying (1647) and its readers” in Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (eds.), Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England (Aldershot: 2006), ch. 9. 43 Jeremy Taylor, Liberty of Prophesying [1647] (1650 edn), 21.
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Going Dutch But of Europe’s multiconfessional states, the Dutch republic ranked first in the estimation of English tolerationists.44 Richard Overton listed Holland, Poland, and Transylvania as nations that had rejected persecution, but Holland came first, and “Mr United Provinces” was one of Overton’s chief witnesses.45 The priority of the Dutch model is not surprising. The Dutch republic was the foreign country that English tolerationists knew best. This was true in the later-17th century, when it was home for a time to John Locke, Gilbert Burnet, and Benjamin Furly.46 In the early-17th century, the United Provinces was a haven for English nonconformists and dissenters, including the first English Baptists, who produced some of the pioneering tolerationist tracts in English.47 Henry Robinson had worked for nine years in the Netherlands as a merchant. Richard Overton seems to have lived there for some time too, possibly joining an Anabaptist congregation. Hugh Peter had been a chaplain and pastor in the United Provinces for several years and visited the country again in 1643 to raise funds for Parliament.48 He believed that the English needed to catch up with the Dutch republic by imitating its policies in numerous areas.49 Roger Williams may not have been to the Netherlands, but he had learnt some Dutch (or the Dutch dialect of German) from colonists at New Amsterdam, and later passed it on to John Milton.50
44 See especially Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, “Dutch contributions to religious toleration”, Church History, 79 (2010): 585–613, an important article that appeared after this chapter was written, and should be read alongside it. English admiration and emulation of the Dutch is explored by Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (London: 2008), though she overlooks religious toleration. See also Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: 2009). 45 Overton, The Arraignement of Mr Persecution, 12, 31, 5. 46 See John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, UK: 2006), ch. 16. 47 See Kevin Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of the English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: 1982); James Coggins, John Smyth’s Congregation: English Separatism, Mennonite Influence and the Elect Nation (Waterloo: 1991). 48 For Peter, Overton, and Robinson, see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 49 See Hugh Peter, Good Work for a Good Magistrate (1651), sig. A6r-v, 19, 20, 22, 27, 39, 92, 102, 104–7. 50 See Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (Oxford: 2008), 247.
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For the most part, English tolerationists chose not to emphasize the limits and complexities of Dutch tolerance.51 In some cases, that may be due to ignorance, but mostly it was because complexity did not serve polemical purposes. Henry Robinson went further than most in acknowledging the chequered history of Dutch policy, but he too accentuated the positive. He insisted (on the authority of Grotius) that during the revolt against Spain, the United Provinces had declared “that they took not up Armes for Religion”. The Dutch Revolt was not a war of religion. Indeed, at a time when Amsterdam and other towns had been overwhelming Catholic, the states had agreed that there should be freedom of conscience for all. Later, however, in the wake of the Synod of Dort, there had been fierce repression of the Arminians, “in some few places by the instigation of a most violent party, seconded by the Prince”. Nevertheless, the Remonstrants were “quickly restored againe, and have now their places of publicke meetings, and greater liberty than ever”, even in Amsterdam and Utrecht, where they had suffered most. Indeed, Robinson did not know of “one place, or City throughout the united Provinces”, where the decrees of the Synod were “at present, coercively enforced”. To the contrary, the Dutch: permit people of all Religions to live amongst them, and though they have continual wars with Spain, and Papists in some Towns amongst them have more liberty then in others, yet every where their freedome is great, and though in some places they are one fourth or one halfe part Papists, yet doe not the States subject themselves to be terrified or troubled with jealousies or other plots and treacheries then in punishing the authours at such times as they happen to be discovered.52
The most critical comments on the limits of Dutch generosity came from Roger Williams in The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy (1652). Here he acknowledged that toleration in the Netherlands was driven by pragmatism more than principle. “The Politick States-men” of Holland had been “lamentably whipt by the King of Spaines (and Gods) Scourge, Duke D’alva, into a Toleration of other mens Consciences”. Forced to build an ecumenical alliance against Spain, they then fore-
51 Recent scholarship highlights these limits. See especially R. Po-Chia Hsai and Henk van Nierop (eds.), Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge UK: 2002); Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, 138–93, 335–70. 52 [Robinson], Liberty of Conscience, 47–8.
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stalled clerical criticism by providing Reformed divines with “sure and setled Maintenance out of the States purse”. Hence, Williams wryly observed, “The Dutch Ministers zeale is not so hot against the Toleration of Hereticks in the Civill State, as the English hath been”. Dutch tolerance owed much to “worldly policie” and “State-necessity”. Some had even suggested that they feared toleration in England because it would stem the influx of economically productive religious refugees. Williams hoped that England would go far beyond “Dutch President”. Despite learning lessons in “their School of Warre” (the revolt against Spain), the Dutch had failed to “learn that one poor Lesson of setting absolutely the consciences of all men free”. They had merely “vouchsafed to the Papists and Arminians the liberty (as I may so speak) of the prison and sometimes to go abroad (as I may say) with a Keeper, &c”.53 Most Puritan tolerationists did not share Williams’ desire to outstrip the tolerance of the Dutch. They wanted to secure liberty for all conscientious Protestants, but were much more hesitant about Jews and especially Catholics.54 The appeal of the Dutch owed much to the fact that they were a predominantly Protestant people, with a Reformed public church. The policy of Dutch magistrates seemed more directly applicable to the English situation than that of popish French kings or distant Polish noblemen. Faced by English Presbyterians agitating for a comprehensive national church, Independents could highlight the very different setup tolerated by the Dutch Reformed. As John Goodwin pointed out, the Presbyterians had sworn (in the Solemn League and Covenant) to follow “the example of the best reformed churches”, but “the Church of Holland” was known to be “very indulgent . . . to give Toleration upon Toleration, I mean to tolerate severall kinds of Religion, and Church-Government amongst them”. The Reformed Church was the public church of the Netherlands “and is reputed Presbyteriall”, but “in severall populous towns in the LowCountries, scarce every 5th, nay, not every 8th person . . . is immembred
53
Williams, The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy, 175, sigs. Ar, Br. This is especially true of the conservative Congregationalists. See Avihu Zakai, “Religious toleration and its enemies: The Independent divines and the issue of toleration during the English Civil War,” Albion 21 (1989): 1–33. 54
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into any of their Churches”.55 The implication was clear: if the Dutch Presbyterians could be so accommodating of non-members and other congregations, why not the English? Tolerationists insisted that the Dutch way was a godly way. Whereas Presbyterians pitted licentious Amsterdam against godly Geneva, William Dell told a very different tale of two cities. Dell asserted the spiritual credentials of Amsterdam, as a city that gave “free passage” to the Gospel, and accused Protestant forcers of conscience of taking their cue from Rome, the capital of persecution.56 According to Roger Williams, “the States of Holland” had learned from Christ (“the wisest Polititian that ever was”) who taught that the tares should be allowed to grow alongside the wheat until the day of judgement. The Dutch “tollerate, though not owne (as you say) the several Sects amongst them which differ from them, & are of another conscience and worship”.57 In the 1650s, one writer declared that he much preferred “the free Ayre” of Holland “where all Religions are permitted”, to the enforced conformity of Puritan New England.58 For radical Independents, the Dutch republic was a model to set against Presbyterian Geneva and Congregationalist Massachusetts. Tolerationists also suggested that Dutch tolerance had secured temporal blessings from above. Roger Willliams was convinced of it: What was it, that within the memory of man hath so wonderfully (almost miraculously) raised and advanced from the low valleys, that poor fishertown of Amsterdam (now one of the gallantest of the Lady Cities of the world)? I say, What was it but Mercy, Mercy which that poor Fisher-town shewed to distressed and persecuted consciences . . . ?59
In another work, Williams expanded the point, claiming that Amsterdam had been populated by religious refugees fleeing from the town of Enchuysen, “whose Zealous, over-zealous and furious Clergie provoke the Civil Magistrates to persecute dissenting, non conforming consciences”: This confluence of the persecuted, by Gods most gracious coming with them, drew Boats, drew Trade, drew Shipping, and that so mightily in so short a time, that Shipping, Trading, wealth, Greatnesse, Honour (almost
55
John Goodwin, Anapologesiates Antapologia (1646), 70; Goodwin, Theomachia,
23. 56 57 58 59
Dell, Right Reformation (1646), 41–2. Roger Williams, Queries of the Highest Consideration (1644), 12. Freedom of Religious Worship, 26. [Roger Williams], The Examiner Defended (1652), 17–8.
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to astonishment in the Eyes of all Europe, and the world) have appeared to fall as out of Heaven in a Crown or Garland upon the head of that poor Fisher-Town.60
The Anglo-Dutch war of 1652–54 made it more difficult to celebrate the Dutch miracle.61 Williams, who was writing in the year the war broke out, joined other Independents in accusing the Dutch of falling into pride, ingratitude, and drunkenness. But with some ingenuity, he turned the conflict to his advantage by stressing that God judged nations on their treatment of the oppressed. The rise of the Dutch republic was due to its mercy, but its failure to assist the embattled godly of England would “stain the Pride of all their rising Glory”.62 Despite the Anglo-Dutch war, tolerationists throughout the 1640s and 1650s were consistent in attributing the stability and prosperity of the Netherlands to their policy of toleration.63 The Baptist Blackwood alleged that liberty of conscience united all citizens behind the magistrates.64 John Goodwin insisted that the Dutch had never experienced any “contentions or mischiefs” from their religious minorities. Their only real crisis (in the 1610s) came about because of quarrels among the established clergy, not the tolerated; their Presbyterians, not their Independents.65 Walwyn argued that “the prosperity of our Neighbours in Holland” discredited the charge that religious diversity was fatal to a polity—the Dutch lived peaceably “one amongst an other”, and the Spaniard could testify that they united effectively in defense of their common liberties and their common enemies.66 At the Whitehall Debates in 1648, when leading Independents allied to the New Model Army clashed about the degree of toleration to be afforded minorities, the preacher Hugh Peter attacked “that old spirit of domination, of trampling upon your brethren”. “Witness the country next from us,” he remarked, “that hath all the marks of a flourishing state upon it—I mean the Low Countries: they are not so against, or afraid
60
Williams The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy, sig. A4v. The shifts in English attitudes and policy towards the Dutch in 1650s are explored in Steven Pincus, Protestantism and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, UK: 1996), 9–191. 62 [Williams], The Examiner Defended, 18. 63 See, for example, Richardson, The Necessity of Toleration, 38. 64 Blackwood, The Storming of Antichrist, 21. 65 Goodwin, Anapologesiates Antapologia, 115. 66 The Writings of William Walwyn, 114–5. See also 161. 61
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of, this toleration”.67 The Baptist John Vernon declared that English toleration should extend to “Jews or heathens”, for had not the Low Countries flourished “ever since they suffered every man to worship according to his conscience, and even the Jews themselves to worship in their publike synagogues”.68 Another radical tolerationist declared that “The wise and Potent States of Holland—by long experience, have found no danger, but much increase of wealth and Trade, to accrue by the permission of all Religions”.69 In the 1650s, the republican propagandist Marchamont Nedham attacked “Uniformity-mongers” and declared that England could learn from “the states of Holland, who by a prudent toleration of severall professions, have established themselves in such a measure of peace plenty, and liberty, as is not to be equalled by any other [nation]”.70 The most intriguing defence of Dutch pluralism was developed by Henry Robinson. In an argument reminiscent of Pascal’s wager or Rawls’ veil of ignorance, he suggested that one’s chances of finding the true religion were greater in a multiconfessional society than in a confessional one. Imagine, he said, a man suffering from a “deadly disease”, for which there are 20 possible remedies, only one of which is effectual. If the man has access to just one possible cure, his chances of recovery are 20 to one. But if he is able to experiment with all the remedies, his odds of finding the right one are significantly higher. So it is with religion. In Roman Catholic Spain or Lutheran Germany, one has access to just one possible remedy. But in Holland, all the options are available. Suppose that a Turk comes to Amsterdam, seeking Christian truth. Here he “informes himself fully of them all and at last fixes upon one”. He may, given the human “propensity to evill”, make the wrong choice. But he will at least have encountered the true religion, and made an “examination or triall” of the alternatives. In most countries, by contrast, the people are “only suffered to be instructed in the Country Religion (be it good or bad)”, and they take up “a Religion at hap hazard”. Better to live in Amsterdam, than in Rome.71 And better to choose your religion, than entrust that choice to the magistrate. Gamblers preferred to “lose their own money, then that others should
67 68 69 70 71
Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 138. John Vernon, The Swords Abuse Asserted (1648), 13. Freedom of Religious Worship, 11. Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth Stated (1650), 98–9. [Robinson], John the Baptist, 84–5.
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lose it for them”, and in the case of souls, we would “quickly chuse to hazard the losse of our own souls our selves”, rather than take a chance on the judgment of someone else.72 Robinson’s probabilistic approach to the salvific prospects of individuals was couched within a wider missionary argument for multiconfessionalism.73 Dutch toleration advanced the Gospel; the “execrable tyranny and dominion” of the Papacy in Italy and Spain retarded it. The early Christians had been able to spread their Gospel freely across national boundaries thanks to the pax Romana. Modern Protestants, however, had made little effort to take the Gospel to “Infidells and Hereticks” in their own lands, nor had they “allured them to come unto us”.74 Yet Christians had a duty to “preach the Gospel unto all Nations” (Matt 28:19), and this could only be done when Reformed Protestants debated freely with Papists and Turks without fear of persecution. “This combat,” Robinson explained, “must be fought out upon eaven ground, on equall termes, neither side must expect to have greater liberty of speech, writing, Printing, or whatsoever else, then the other”. Protestants would never fulfil Christ’s missionary mandate until they lived among other peoples and tolerated other faiths. The “maximes of persecution” prevented Christians from fulfilling Christ’s commission.75 Robinson the godly merchant wanted to see the removal of the protectionist barriers erected by confessional states. His vision of free trade in religion, of a competition for hearts and minds “fought out upon eaven ground, on equall termes”, was remarkably bold, though it has more in common with the strategy of later Protestant missionary movements than with modern secular liberalism.76
72
[Robinson], Liberty of Conscience, 41. John Locke advanced a similar argument in response to Jonas Proast in the Second Letter concerning Toleration. See Richard Vernon (ed.), Locke on Toleration (Cambridge, UK: 2010), 69–70. 74 [Robinson], John the Baptist, 44, 6–7. 75 [Robinson], Liberty of Conscience, 17–21. 76 On later efforts to promote “free passage” of the Protestant Gospel, see Todd Thompson, “The Evangelical Alliance, Religious Liberty, and the Evangelical Conscience in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Journal of Religious History 33 (2009): 49–65. 73
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The arguments and examples used by radical Protestant tolerationists were ripe for exploitation by members of England’s Catholic minority. Many Independents (including Milton) refused to extend toleration to Catholics, citing both their idolatry and their loyalty to a foreign power.77 But some did envisage toleration for peaceable Catholics.78 A number of Catholic writers posed as Independents and pushed the logic of the tolerationist argument towards Catholic toleration.79 The example of Europe’s multiconfessional polities served their purposes. A New Petition of the Papists (1641) has been attributed to William Walwyn, but it could be a Catholic tract. It suggested a new law imposing penalties on those who “affront or upbraid the other for his Religion”. This was already the policy in “divers well governed Countries”, such as “Holland, Germanie, France and Polonia”.80 In 1649, another advocate of toleration for Catholics used the same examples. Introducing himself as a supporter of the Levellers’ Agreement of the People, he argued that the liberty of conscience it promised should include Catholics. After all, in France, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland, “persons of all Religions are indifferently employed and found faithfull in Offices and Places of greatest trust”.81 In The Christian Moderator: Or Persecution for Religion Condemned (1651), the Catholic John Austin also ventriloquized a radical Protestant voice, but he displayed a more detailed knowledge of the practice of European multiconfessionalism. In Switzerland there was a “union of hearts, and common interests of State, between the Protestant and Catholike Cantons”: . . . very many Churches serve by turns upon the same day, for the exercise of both Religions, dividing every Sunday morning into two parts, 77
For the most recent discussion, see Andrew Hadfield, “Milton and Catholicism” in Achinstein and Sauer, Milton and Toleration, ch. 10. 78 See N. Carlin, “Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan Revolution” in Ole Grell and Robert Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, UK: 1996), 216–30; John Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal 41 (1998): 961–85. 79 Several of these writers (including John Austin) belonged to the idiosyncratic Catholic circle gathered around Thomas White (alias Blacklo). See Jeffrey R. Collins, “Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649,” Historical Journal 45 (2002): 305–31. 80 A New Petition of the Papists (1649), in The Writings of William Walwyn, 57. 81 No Papist, No Presbyterian (1649), 1–2, 4.
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and assigning to each about three hours for their devotions, wherein they are so punctuall to maintain equality, that if the Protestants have the first three hours one morning, next week they are to have the Last; and this they continually practise, without enterfering or offending one another.82
Austin continued by noting that “in many Provinces, and free Towns in Germany”, adherents of different confessions displayed “fair comportment’ towards one another”. But the “most remarkable” case was that of Holland. Even during the long struggle against Spain, “the States (then whom none are more vigilant over their true Interest) have not only with security, but exceeding benefit to their Commonwealth, tolerated the Catholikes of quiet Conversation, to live freely amongst them”. As a result, the Catholics, “in gratitude for so favourable a treating, have exactly corresponded to the mercy of their magistrates, with a most, constant, sincere, and faithfull obedience”.83 When Austin (in his Protestant guise) compared continental arrangements to the case of the English recusants, he was struck by the stark contrast and “the unreasonablenesse of our persecution”. If the Swiss, the Germans, and the Dutch could accommodate religious difference, why not the English? Christians, Jews, and Turks were “opposite in belief ”, “yet we see by experience that Jews are not inconsistent with the Government of Christians, nor Christians with that of the Turks, no not such Christians as are here in question, Papists”. In France, “the Papists themselves . . . outgo us in their tender and moderate behaviour towards the Protestants of their Country, notwithstanding former provocations to jealousie in the last civil wars, nay notwithstanding present provocations by our severity against all of their profession in England”. Birchley himself (i.e. Austin) had attended many conferences in Paris, where clergy and tradesmen of different confessions “freely defended” their own opinions, without fear and “with a courteous friendliness and mutuall compassion”. He had often thought that this was a French fashion worth importing into England. Furthermore, the French King allowed “a certain number of publike Churches to Protestants, and as much liberty in private for the exercise of their consciences as any disagreers from the common belief of the State
82
William Birchley [i.e. John Austin], The Christian Moderator, or Persecution for Religion Condemned (1651), 16. The practice of sharing churches is vividly illuminated in Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 198–217. 83 [Austin], The Christian Moderator, 16.
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can reasonably desire”. Even the Spanish Inquisition, “(so universally abhor’d) practices all imaginable means towards the accused, to reduce his judgement to theirs, before they pronounce theirs against him, and upon the conformity immediately acquit him”. The English might “cry up Liberty of Conscience”, but they still had a lot to learn from their European neighbours. Yet there was hope—the Presbyterians, those “cruell torturers of the Conscience” had been defeated, and under its new Independent rulers, England might yet enact “a generall Act of Conscience-Indemnity”.84 In the politically chaotic year of 1659, following Oliver Cromwell’s death, Catholic pamphleteers once again tried to foster sympathy for their co-religionists by posing as radical Independents and pointing to European multiconfessionalism. One writer noted that the Kings of France and Poland entrusted high military office to Protestants, a policy that evoked gratitude and loyalty among the tolerated minority. English persecution of Catholics, he claimed, had “made us an obloquy to all our neighbours, even to our brethren the Hollanders, whose Christian policy even beyond envy flourisheth at Amsterdam, and other places, with exemplar piety and freedom”.85 Another pamphleteer observed that religious coercion had been condemned by Catholic monarchs like King Stephen the Wise of Poland, the King of Bohemia, the Emperor Charles V, and Kings Henry III and IV of France. English regimes, however, could be worse than “the Spanish Inquisition it self, which we esteem so odious”. English merchants in Spain were not “molested or troubled by the Inquisition” (unless for public disorder), and it had even banished Spaniards who abused Englishmen as heretics. It was the shame of the English that they had been “overwitted by the Hollanders, whom yet we consider inferior to us”. Although the large Catholic minority in the Netherlands did not enjoy “the publick exercise of their Religion, (which is granted to diverse other professions), but rather a connivance of private exercise”, they had proved “most faithful” to the state, and served it even against a Catholic prince. The “prudent moderation” of the Dutch had “setled and maintained their Republick, raising it almost from nothing to a great height and perfection”. The English, however, could settle noth-
84
[Austin], The Christian Moderator, 17, 25–6. T. F., Philanthropia, or a holding forth of Universall immunitie in exercise of Christian Religion (1659), 5. 85
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ing because they insisted on “persecuting one Another for Religion” which “put the State always a rolling”. They had much to learn from the Dutch model.86 Jewish Readmission Besides proving useful to English Catholics, the Dutch example also served the cause of Jewish readmission. Jews had been expelled from medieval England, and the country still had no open Jewish community when the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel formally petitioned Cromwell and his Council of State about readmission.87 Among his contacts were philo-semitic Puritan millenarians like the ecumenist John Dury and the Baptist pastor Henry Jessey.88 These figures expected the imminent conversion of the Jews as a prelude to the coming rule of Christ and believed that it would be hastened if Protestant nations followed the Dutch by allowing the Jews to reside among them. Jewish merchants, for their part, hoped to have as much freedom of worship and trade in London “as they enjoy in Holland, and did enjoy in Poland, Prussia and other places”.89 Jessey thought it a scandal that the Jews were “Tolerated by the POPE, and by the Duke of FLORENCE; by the TURKS, and by the BARBARIANS”, but not by the English, who could expose them to the Gospel.90 Another defender of readmission agreed: We finde Hungaria entertains them, Germany harbours them, Poland till these wars, and Sweden trades with them, Denmark affords them habitation and Synagogues, Italy loves them, Holland approves them, Hamburgh, Lubeck, most of the Imperial Hans-towns invite them In;
86 England’s Settlement upon the Two Solid Foundations of the Peoples Civil and Religious Liberties (1659), 21–3, 30–2. 87 See David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford: 1982); idem, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: 1994), 107–40; Eliane Glaser, Judaism without Jews: Philosemitism and Christian Polemic in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: 2007). 88 See Yosef Kaplan, Henry Mechoulan, and Richard H. Popkin (eds.), Mennasseh ben Israel and his World (Leiden: 1989); Ernestine G. van der Wall, “A philo-semitic millenarian on the reconciliation of Jews and Christians: Henry Jessey and his ‘The glory and salvation of Judah and Israel’ ” in David S. Katz and Jonathan I. Israel (eds.), Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews (Leiden: 1990), 161–84. 89 Henry Jessey, A Narrative of the late Proceeds at White-hall, concerning the Jews (1656), 10. 90 Jessey, A Narrative, 11.
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john coffey and yet in all these Countries and places, who admit them, there is no disturbance in Government, no Civil or Inbred Commotions, no popular Insurrections against the Magistrates, about the Admission of the Jews, nor any the least offence taken at the Jew, but live quietly and peaceably together, the Magistrate protecting, and the Jews obeying his Orders and Injunctions.91
When Cromwell convened a conference to discuss readmission at Whitehall, it produced protracted debate and no consensus. Jewish readmission was opposed by some English merchants and by antitolerationist Puritans like William Prynne. Yet the episode did reveal the presence of an underground Sephardic community in London, and led to its informal recognition. Once again, English tolerationists had used European examples to imagine a world beyond the confessional state. Anti-tolerationists That vision, of course, was shared by only a minority, and it was fiercely opposed by many of the godly. But opponents of toleration were no more parochial than their rivals. Both Scottish and English Presbyterians had well established contacts with Dutch Reformed divines and with expatriate Presbyterian communities. The English heresiographer Thomas Edwards would end his days (ironically) in the pluralistic city of Amsterdam, where he was hosted by a staunchly Presbyterian English church. He had already exploited his Dutch contacts in order to investigate the activity of congregationalist exiles in the 1630s.92 The militant Covenanter Samuel Rutherford was offered chairs at the universities of Franeker and Utrecht, and Robert Baillie, another fierce Covenanter critic of the Independents, kept up a regular correspondence with his cousin who lived in the Netherlands. Anti-tolerationists claimed that radical Independents were citing Dutch precedent in order to go beyond it. Baillie informed his cousin
91 D. L., Israels Condition and Cause Pleaded, or Some Arguments for the Jews Admission into England (1656), 40–1. The same argument is made by reference to the Dutch experience in Thomas Collier, A Brief Answer to some of the Objections and Demurs made against the Coming in and inhabiting of the Jews in this Commonwealth (1656), 10. 92 See Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: 2004), 1–2; Thomas Edwards, Antapologia (1644) and Gangraena (1646).
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that some of the Independent party were “openly for a full libertie of conscience to all sects, even Turks, Jews, Papists, and all to be more openly tolerate than with yow”.93 On Baillie’s account, radical Independents were abusing the Dutch model, hiding its limits and their own ambitions: Not only they praise your magistrate, who for policie gives some secret tolerance to diverse religions, wherein, as I conceave, your divines preaches against them as great sinners; but avows, that by God’s command, the magistrate is discharged to put the least discourtesie on any man, Turk, Jew, Papist, Socinian, or whatever, for his religion.94
As these quotations suggest, anti-tolerationists could exploit the limits of Dutch tolerance. Thomas Edwards argued that the successful containment of the Dutch Arminians demonstrated that magistrates could suppress heresies, recover “many souls”, and settle “the peace of Churches and States”. He and other Presbyterians knew that orthodox Dutch Reformed clergy were critical of the lax policy of their regents. Franciscus Junius and Gisbertus Voetius could be cited in support of conventional Calvinist teaching on the religious duties of secular magistrates.95 And in Gangraena, Edwards printed a letter from a Dutch divine lamenting the spread of sectarianism and heterodoxy in England and highlighting the restrictions on them in the Netherlands: O blessed holy Holland, righteous Amsterdam, heretofore accounted the sink of Errours and Heresies, but now justified by London. With us are punished with banishment, or piercing through the tong with a hot Iron, those that but slanderously speak of the Virgin Mary: Here we burne the books of the Socinians Errours, and they may not with knowledge be sold in these parts: Here indeed every one is left to enjoy the freedome of his Conscience in his own Family, but to keep Conventicles and meetings of divers Families together, Amsterdam it selfe will not suffer, except in Anabaptists, Lutherans, and Remonstrants. At London is taught Blasphemy against Christ, God, his Word, Worship, and Sacraments, by Enthusiasts, Antinomians, Libertines, and Seekers: There the Socinian tricks are new moulded, there all Sects and Hereticks may keep
93 Robert Baillie, Letters and Journals, ed. D. Laing, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1841–42), ii.181. 94 Baillie, Letters and Journals, ii.184. 95 Thomas Edwards, The Casting Down of the Last and Strongest Hold of Satan, or a Treatise against Toleration (1647), 56, 185–6.
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john coffey their separated, publike and secret Conventicles. Whence is it that you are so suddenly led away unto another Gospell?96
If Dutch practice could be used to counter radical Independents, it was still an embarrassment to critics of toleration. They preferred to look to Geneva. Even a conservative Congregationalist could note that “the Church and Religion doth prosper better in Geneva and its territory and among the Helevetian Protestants, where one way of true Religion is maintained, than in Polonia, such States wherein this mingle-mangle is tolerated”.97 Less surprisingly, Presbyterians praised Geneva, which “hath Lawes against Hereticks and other false teachers, and have put some Hereticks and Blasphemers to death, as Servetus and others, as is well knowne to those that know any thing of our latter times”. If other Reformed churches or states had not enacted similar laws, “they are and have been faulty”.98 Toleration was depicted as a Dutch error—promoted by Anabaptists and Arminians like Hugo Grotius and Simon Episcopius. Rutherford defined “Arminian liberty of conscience” as the view “that men in a Christian Commonwealth, may be of any Religion, and the magistrate is to behold men as an indifferent spectator, not caring what religion they bee of, whether they be Papists, Jewes, Pagans, Anabaptists, Socinians, Macedonians”.99 Another Covenanter, George Gillespie, complained that toleration was promoted by “the Socinians, Arminians and Anabaptists”, but “constantly opposed by all that were sound and orthodoxe, both Ancient and Moderne”. Sadly, “in Germany, France, Holland, Poland, yea under the Turkish Tyranny, contrary religions, and opposite persuasions and practises, have been, and are tolerated upon State-principles”.100 Thomas Edwards warned that the Dutch Arminians “at first desired but a toleration. . . . but afterwards that by the connivance and favour of the Magistrates they were in some Cities and places (as Amsterdam &c.) grown to a great number, and had a great power, then they would not . . . tolerate the orthodox Ministers, but persecuted them . . .” English Independents, like the German Ana-
96
Edwards, The Second Part of Gangraena (1646), 165. A Censure of that Reverend and Learned Man of God Mr John Cotton (1656), 8. 98 A Vindication of a Printed Paper (1646), 22. 99 See Rutherford, A Free Disputation, 216–7, 355. See also Prynne, The Sword of the Christian Magistrate Supported (1653), 159. 100 [George Gillespie], A Late Dialogue betwixt a Civilian and a Divine (1644), 32, 30. 97
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baptist and Dutch Arminians before them, would use toleration as a stepping stone to repression.101 Dutch pluralism haunted the imagination of anti-tolerationists. As early as 1641, during a moral panic over the swarm of sectaries, one writer claimed that London was being “Amsterdamnified by severall opinions”.102 A royalist pamphleteer, shocked by the recent publication of the Koran in English translation, warned that if the Independents had their way, England would soon have “a Medley of Religions”. “Amsterdam must be beholding to us, as we have been formerly to them, for new Opinions”.103 Theophilus Brabourne offered a curt reply to tolerationists: “Why should you make Holland a president for us in this respect? Are they not the reproach of the world, for maintaining all Religions, men say, if a man hath lost his Religion, he may find it in Amsterdam. Let the practise of the Prophets and Apostles be our president, and not Holland”.104 In Englands Metamorphosis, or a Dialogue between London and Amsterdam (1647), the parallels between the two cities were fully developed. London addressed the Dutch town with gushing admiration: “Be thou my president; are not within thee a mixt multitude of severall nations, worshippers of the true God, of Mahomet, and of no God; and these occasion no garboiles in thee . . . they tosse not each others limbs on the swords of their tongues, nor damn each other with invective oratory, even to the profoundity of abysse”. Amsterdam confirmed this report, explaining that her tranquil pluralism was due to the absence of bigoted Presbyterians. London expressed wonder at Amsterdam’s “order in the midst of disorder”, and the two rejoiced at London’s metamorphosis. Amsterdam would no longer need to function as a “city of refuge” for the “thronging Sectaries” expelled from England. They could now flourish at home. Amsterdam admitted that she was “wholly estranged from God”, and had gone whoring after idols. The two cities were like Judah and Samaria, sisters in apostasy. The dialogue ended with a poetic warning that lamented the sectarian fragmentation chronicled in Edwards’ Gangraena: 101
Edwards, Antapologia (1644), 279–80. Religions Enemies (1641), 6. On the moral panic of 1641 see David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–42 (Oxford: 2006), ch. 10. 103 [Dr Richard Holdsworth?], An Answer without a Question: or the Late Schismaticall Petition for a Diabolicall Toleration of Seuerall Religions Expounded (1649), 6. 104 Theophilus Brabourne, The Second Part of the Change of Church Discipline (1654), 63. 102
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john coffey Amazed and amated much I am, To see this Kingdome turn’d to Amsterdam; Six years agoe we had of Sects fourscore, Which are increast now to one hundred more . . .105
Amsterdam was also denounced by opponents of the readmission of the Jews. William Hughes declared that “Reason of State makes the Dutch-men tolerate all Religions but the Popish. From whence shall it not presently be concluded, that all their neighbours should do the like”.106 William Prynne poured cold water on the millenarian dreams of Jewish conversion—“learned able Protestant Divines in Holland, Germany, France, Denmarke’ had been unable to convert the Jews, so “what hopes have we to do it?”107 For most English Puritans, going Dutch had limited appeal. Conclusion Yet, if the English remained largely sceptical about European models, the toleration controversy had expanded horizons and placed a question mark against Anglo-centric complacency. Contemporary cases of multiconfessionalism were not at the heart of the dispute, but they had been widely invoked and debated. It is difficult to assess the impact of this debate on English attitudes and practice. W. K. Jordan was being wildly optimistic when he claimed that by 1660 the necessity of toleration was accepted by “responsible opinion” and “the mass of men”.108 More recent historians tend towards the opposite extreme. It does seem clear that tolerationist theory had not fundamentally shifted public opinion. In 1659, the well-connected young Independent Henry Stubbe declared that “Those who are for a free Toleration are the lesse numerous, beyond all proportion”.109 The developments of the 1660s support his assessment. We can be more confident about the impact of practice on theory. For some individuals, the example of peaceful religious coexistence
105 Englands Metamorphosis, or a Dialogue between London and Amsterdam (1647), 1–2, 6. 106 William Hughes, Anglo-Judaeus, or the History of the Jews, whilst here in England (1656), sig. Fiir. 107 William Prynne, A Short Demurrer to the Jews (1656), 110. 108 Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration, IV, 9, 467. 109 Stubbe, An Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause (1659), sig. **8v–**8r.
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overseas assisted their intellectual shift away from the Augustinian defence of religious coercion. Tolerationists like Henry Robinson, Richard Overton, Roger Williams, and John Austin had witnessed inter-confessional and even inter-faith cooperation in the Netherlands, France, and America, and this was clearly a factor in their thinking, perhaps a decisive one. Yet even though these writers recognised the political origins of religious liberty, their own texts laid relatively little weight on continental case studies. They chose to fight for toleration on the high ground of moral and religious principle, not on the low ground of “worldly policie” and “State necessitie”. That may have been naïve. But perhaps they were right to think, like Locke and Bayle after them, that (in the final analysis) the legitimacy of religious coercion could only be subverted by normative considerations.
PART SIX
CENTRAL EUROPE
MULTICONFESSIONALISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE Howard Louthan There is an old Hungarian joke that relates the story of a man born at the beginning of the 20th century. Toward the end of his life, he is visited by a guest who asks him to highlight the major events of his life. Clearing his throat with a cough, he begins, “I was born in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. In my youth I attended school in Czechoslovakia but then finished my studies in Hungary. Later I lived for an extended period in the Soviet Union, and presently in retirement I reside in the Ukraine.” His interlocutor, now intrigued by this surprisingly peripatetic elderly gentleman, responds by asking him to describe his travels in greater detail. With a wry smile and slight shake of the head, the old man replies, “Travels? Who said I ever left my hometown?” This story, intended to reflect the traumatic political changes of this region in the 20th century, is equally appropriate for those who study the religious history of premodern Central Europe. This is territory where borders move mysteriously, and the scholar is never precisely sure of his location. In corresponding fashion, any discussion of confessional developments in Central Europe must begin then with a serious consideration of its physical, political, and social topography, for its contested geography has contributed to its problematic historiography in at least three significant respects. Most obvious is the matter of boundaries. Where is Central Europe precisely? In the English language we seem capable of neither naming this region (central Europe, eastern Europe, east central Europe, central and eastern Europe?) nor spelling it (upper-case C, or lower-case c?). There is of course a significant historiographical debate on this issue, which need not be repeated here.1 What is particularly relevant for the religious historian today is the lingering impact of nationalism on this territory. Historians in the 19th century enlisted religion
1
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann offers a brief overview in his Court, Cloister and City (Chicago: 1995), 16–21; for a recent critique of the term as a more unified cultural space, see R. J. W. Evans, “Central Europe: The History of an Idea,” in his Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs (Oxford: 2006), 293–304.
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in the grand project of nation building as they frequently conflated creed with country. In Bohemia, František Palacký saw the Hussite movement as an expression of Czech proto-nationalism. Ecclesiastical historians in Hungary cast the story of Calvinism, culminating with the infamous incident of the galley slaves, as an essential element of the Magyar struggle against the despotic rule of the Habsburgs,2 while Catholic scholars in Poland heroically portrayed their church as the bulwark of Christendom against the triple threat of Mongols, Turks, and Protestants.3 Though scholars now certainly recognize the multiconfessional nature of these societies, the effects of nationalism persist. Histories of the Reformation in countries such as Slovenia, Slovakia, or Lithuania continue to be formulated within a framework defined by narrow and anachronistic political boundaries.4 When considering multiconfessionalism in Central Europe, historians must consciously set their work in a territory with wide and porous borders. The activities of Poland’s most prominent Protestant reformer, Johannes a Lasco/Jan Łaski (1499–1560), serve as a case in point. The scion of a prominent noble family, a Lasco crisscrossed the continent as he emerged as one of the most important leaders of the international Reformed community. He directed the Strangers’ Church in London and insinuated himself into England’s internal affairs to become in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s judgment the kingdom’s first Puritan.5 He was superintendent of the church in East Frisia and exerted significant influence on the Calvinist movement in the Low Countries. He ended his career as the founder and organizer of the Calvinist church of Lesser Poland and Lithuania. As such, there is a sizable body of literature analyzing a Lasco’s activities from London to Vilnius. This historiography, however, is divided into two distinct
2 In 1675, Habsburg authorities marched 41 Hungarian Calvinist ministers, who refused to convert to Catholicism, to Naples where they were sent off in the Spanish galleys. Liberated by the Dutch the following year, they became great heroes of the Reformed world, as their release was celebrated across Protestant Europe. Graeme Murdock, “Responses to Habsburg Persecution of Protestants in Seventeenth-Century Hungary,” Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009): 37–52. 3 Norman Davies, God’s Playground (New York: 1982), 159–160. 4 Marjan Dolgan (ed.), Družbena in kulturna podoba slovenske reformacije (Ljubljana: 1986); Karl Schwarz and Peter Švorc (eds.), Die Reformation und ihre Wirkungsgeschichte in der Slowakei: Kirchen- und konfessionsgeschichtliche Beiträge (Vienna: 1996); Antanas Musteikis, The Reformation in Lithuania (Boulder, CO: 1988). 5 Diarmaid MacCulloch, “The importance of Jan Laski in the English Reformation” in Christoph Strohm (ed.), Johannes a Lasco (1499–1560) (Tübingen: 2000), 345.
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bodies: Polish language material considering his time in that kingdom and a collection of primarily German and English literature reflecting on his work elsewhere. There has been little dialogue between these two camps, and as a result, we do not have a broad synthetic view of a Lasco and his impact on Central Europe writ large.6 On the Catholic side, how does one examine what is known in German as the Kelchbewegung, a movement within the church that advocated the lay use of the chalice at the Eucharist? One recent survey views it principally as a German phenomenon, but what the author is describing was merely one part of a broader reform current in 16th-century Central Europe.7 This matter was a critical issue for many Bohemians in particular. The chalice had been the symbol of their revolt against Rome in the 15th century, and its celebration at the Eucharist was the great emblem of Hussite or Utraquist identity. In Poland, too, this was an affair of some urgency. The kingdom’s most influential Catholic leader, Stanislaus Hosius, travelled widely through the region speaking and writing against this practice. Rome even dispatched him to Vienna in an effort to bring the wayward Habsburgs back in line on this matter. A second significant issue concerns the people who lived within Central Europe’s nebulous boundaries, for the region’s human geography was as complex as its physical and political. The 14th century was a critical turning point, for the lines of local dynasties that had ruled much of this territory for generations failed. The Arpáds, Piasts, and Přemysls were replaced by Angevins, Jagiellonians, Luxemburgs, and Habsburgs. The newcomers, whose family holdings extended across the continent, brought with them a more cosmopolitan set of sensibilities that had a substantial impact on the evolution of religious life and the development of a multiconfessional society. The Angevins kept the Hungarian kingdom embroiled in Italian affairs and as a consequence promoted a rich cultural exchange between the two regions, setting a pattern that in the 16th and 17th centuries had intriguing consequences, as radical Italian thinkers contributed to the growth of anti-Trinitarianism throughout the Hungarian and Polish lands in
6 The standard Polish biography is the new edition of Oskar Bartel, Jan Łaski, Część I (1499–1556) (Warsaw: 1999); the second part was completed by Halina Kowalska and published as Działalność reformatorska Jana Łaskiego w Polsce 1556–1560 (Warsaw: 1999). 7 Marc Forster, Catholic Germany from Reformation to Enlightenment (Basingstoke: 2007), 31–2.
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particular.8 Poland’s first Jagiellonian monarch, the Lithuanian prince who was baptized and christened Władysław Jagiełło (r. 1386–1434), is also a compelling case. This new Christian king had an interesting pedigree, a former pagan but now Catholic. His mother, though, was a Ruthenian princess, and his home territory was dominated by an Orthodox nobility. This curious religious amalgam is reflected aesthetically as Władysław encouraged confessional cross-fertilization in the arts. In Sandomierz and Lublin, he commissioned Orthodox artists to decorate Catholic churches. The resulting work, among the finest of late medieval Poland, represents visually the fascinating fusion of east and west. In Bohemia the Luxemburg Emperor Charles IV (r. 1346–78) played an especially critical role, as he brought east and west together in his own person. His mother was a Přemyslid princess, a member of the Slavic family who had ruled Bohemia for four centuries. Charles was born in Prague and actually christened Václav (Wenceslas) in honor of the kingdom’s most important patron. His father was John of Luxemburg who had died fighting the English at Crécy. The son grew up at the French court, managed the family lands in northern Italy, and eventually returned to Bohemia in 1333. The cosmopolitan prince oversaw a remarkable cultural renaissance and transformed Prague into one of the great cities of late-medieval Europe. Charles left an especially deep imprint on the religious life of the region. Through his energy and enterprise he assembled what was purportedly next to Rome the largest relic collection in all of Christendom. With the assistance of Pope Clement VI, his former tutor, he helped engineer Prague’s promotion to an archdiocese, and then without missing a beat he commissioned the celebrated French architect Matthias of Arras to design the city’s gothic masterpiece, the St. Vitus Cathedral.9 Both Saxon monks and Byzantine missionaries had contributed to the Christianization of the Bohemian and Moravian lands in the 9th century, and the emperor recognized this dual legacy as he shaped his capital city. In a colossal undertaking that had no parallel north of the Alps, Charles and his architects laid out a new city of Prague that encompassed nearly 1,000 acres. Critical to the character of New 8
Domenico Caccamo, Eretici italiani in Moravia, Polonia, Transilvania: 1558–1611: studi e documenti (Florence: 1999). 9 David Mengel, “Emperor Charles IV (1346–78) as the Architect of Local Religion in Prague,” Austrian History Yearbook 41 (2010): 15–29.
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Town were its religious institutions, nine of them specifically established at the emperor’s behest.10 Viewed together, they reflect an imperial program that promoted Charles’s spiritual vision with its distinct universal pretensions. The exquisite Church of Karlov with its octagonal nave was modeled after Charlemagne’s chapel in Aachen.11 Even more intriguing is the Benedictine Monastery of Our Lady and the Slavonic Patrons. In this context we see the emperor acting as mediator between east and west. Monks were brought in from Dalmatia who had been given papal permission to practice their Slavonic liturgy and the Glagolitic language, which had been supposedly developed by Cyril and Methodius. Here worshippers venerated Přemyslid and Byzantine saints with highest honor given to St. Jerome, who at that time was mistakenly credited with the translation of the Bible into Slavonic. In terms of religious art, Charles patronized a style that brought together aesthetic and spiritual elements of Latin and Byzantine Christianity, perhaps best reflected in the stunning Holy Cross Chapel of Karlštejn Castle, an artistic marvel that has elicited comparisons to architectural monuments in Constantinople.12 The world of these cosmopolitan elites with their transnational orientation was reflected at the civic level as well and contributed to the complicated confessional landscape. Central European cities were ethnically complex. To understand a place such as Cracow in the 16th century, we must pay close attention to at least three specific communities: Poles, Germans, and Italians. In 1500, German was the language of Cracow’s academic and mercantile elite. The smaller Italian community made up for lost time through the patronage of Queen Bona Sforza, and by 1550 they had moved into critical positions at the royal court or had fanned out across the city working as merchants, craftsmen, and artists.13 The situation becomes even more complex when
10
Here, see Paul Crossley and Zoë Opačić, “Prague as a new capital” in Barbara Drake Boehm and Jiří Fajt (eds.), Prague. The Crown of Bohemia, 1347–1447 (New Haven: 2005), 59–73. 11 Jiří Fajt, “Karl IV—Herrscher zwischen Prag und Aachen. Der Kult Karls des Grossen und die karolinische Kunst” in Mario Kramp (ed.), Krönungen, Könige in Aachen. Geschichte und Mythos (Mainz: 2000), 2:489–500. 12 Prague. The Crown of Bohemia, 13. 13 Until 1537 priests preached exclusively in German at St. Mary’s, the city’s major church. Anne Markham Schulz, Giammaria Mosca called Padovano: A Renaissance Sculptor in Italy and Poland (State College, PA: 1998), 95; Danuta Quirini-Popławska, Działalność Włochów w Polsce w 1 połowie XVI wieku na dworze królewskim, w dyplomacji, i hierarchii kościelnej (Wrocław: 1973); more generally on cities, see Jaroslav
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we consider the intellectual forces shaping the religious sensibilities of the city’s ecclesiastical leaders. The most influential institutions in this respect were outside Central Europe altogether. In the 16th century the Polish nobility flocked to the universities of Padua and Bologna. In this century alone 37 future bishops studied at Padua.14 When intellectuals today, such as the poets Czesław Miłosz and Tomas Venclova, wax lyrically about a city such as Vilnius and its remarkable cultural diversity, their musings are not simply wistful reveries for a world that never really existed.15 The texture of early modern urban life was very thick indeed. A German visiting Vilnius in the late-16th century noted with some astonishment: In addition to the “Martinists” [i.e., Lutherans], the city has also many sorts of religions and sects, all of whom have their churches and public exercitia [exercises], such as papists, Calvinists, Jesuits, Ruthenians or Muscovites, Anabaptists, Zwinglians and Jews, who also have their synagogue and place of gathering. Then there are the heathens, or Tatars, and all the religions, companies, and sects have libertatem conscientiae, in which no one is hindered.16
The third issue to consider is in some respects a product of Central Europe’s complicated political and social geography. Not surprisingly, the political structures that evolved in a territory of such ambiguous and contested boundaries were characterized by a high degree of decentralization. This development was one of the most important factors contributing to the growth of multiconfessionalism, and a brief survey of the region quickly illustrates that many of the settlements guaranteeing religious freedom were compromises produced by a weak central state. In Bohemia the 1609 Letter of Majesty has been celebrated as an important landmark of religious toleration. This constitutional arrangement was most decidedly a product of political conflict. In the late-16th century the growing strength of the kingdom’s Protestant estates was countered by local Catholic leaders who sought
Miller, Urban Societies in East-Central Europe: 1500–1700 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). 14 Schulz, Giammaria Mosca called Padovano, 91. 15 Czesław Miłosz and Tomas Venclova, “A Dialogue about a City” in Tomas Venclova, Winter Dialogue (Chicago: 1999), 99–144. 16 Cited in David Frick, “The Bells of Vilnius: Keeping Time in a City of Many Calendars” in Lesley Cormack, et al. (eds.), Making Contact: Maps, Identity, and Travel (Edmonton: 2003), 25; also see his “Jews and Others in Seventeenth-Century Wilno: Life in the Neighborhood,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 12 (2005): 8–42.
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to revive their own church and combat the new heresy. In the ensuing chess game the Protestants took shrewd advantage of the 1604 Bocskay rebellion in Hungary and the rift between Habsburg brothers, Rudolf and Matthias. As the price for peace with Bocskay, Archduke Matthias grudgingly granted Hungarian Protestants a number of important concessions. With the struggle between the two brothers reaching its height, Bohemia’s Protestant estates in 1608 agreed to support embattled Emperor Rudolf in exchange for a settlement guaranteeing their own religious freedom. Even in such dire circumstances, it was only with great reluctance that Rudolf finally relented and endorsed the agreement. The establishment of toleration in Poland was also a product of weak central government and political impasse. Emboldened by the accession of Sigismund II Augustus in 1548, Protestants became more vocal with their demands, as they dominated the Polish Diet between 1552 and 1565. Due to their influence, ecclesiastical jurisdiction was suspended while the king intended to call a national synod to resolve the growing confessional crisis. These problems, though, were managed at best in a piecemeal fashion as Protestants and Catholics continued to spar with each other throughout the reign of Sigismund II Augustus. It was only during the interregnum that a settlement was finally reached that was in principle to govern religious affairs for the next two centuries. With the death of the last Jagiellonian and no clear successor in sight, the nobles met in 1573 to elect a new king and set the parameters of his powers. They stipulated that any future monarch must support a provision known as the Warsaw Confederation, a compact that guaranteed religious freedom of the nobility.17 The situation was in some respects even more complicated in Transylvania. The state itself operated in a type of political limbo. With the Turkish advance into central Hungary, the Ottomans endeavored to undercut Habsburg claims to the region and recognized an autonomous Transylvanian polity to their east. Outside the Habsburg orbit, Protestantism flourished here with distinct Lutheran, Calvinist, and Unitarian communities emerging by the 1560s. Its Catholic prince, János Zsigmond Zápolyai, recognizing the difficulties of governing a multiconfessional state, heeded the advice of his Unitarian physician
17 Stanisław Grzybowski, “The Warsaw Confederation of 1573 and other acts of religious tolerance in Europe,” Acta Poloniae Historica 40 (1979): 75–96.
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Ferenc Dávid, and in 1568 issued the short-lived Edict of Turda, which guaranteed the freedoms of the Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Unitarian communities.18 Questions of chronology The problems of geography aside, there is another set of issues that scholars must address to understand properly Central Europe’s complicated confessional landscape. The matter of chronology is particularly vexing. The Late Middle Ages, for example, have been frequently cast as a period of decay, decline, and senescence. Many of these metaphors derive from the work of Johan Huizinga whose Waning of the Middle Ages has been one of the most influential studies of the period and continues to influence the field today.19 Huizinga’s autumnal vision of the Late Middle Ages has been firmly set in the popular imagination through other media such as Ingmar Bergman’s starkly beautiful film, The Seventh Seal. The themes of crisis and decline have had a significant impact on Central European historiography. Representative here is the important anthology Europa 1400: Die Krise des Spätmittelalters edited by two of Germany’s most eminent premodernists.20 Scholars, however, must be cautious before applying this model across the region as a whole, particularly in the area of religion. The image of an old and sclerotic church on the verge of collapse obviously does not reflect the situation in Lithuania, which had officially remained pagan until 1389 when Pope Urban VI recognized it as a Roman Catholic state. Well into the 17th and even 18th centuries, Catholics and Protestants alike struggled to extirpate what they considered as vestiges of paganism in their respective flocks. In his Cosmographia Sebastian Münster even included an illustration of Lithuanian rustics worship-
18
Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier (Oxford: 2000), 15–6, 19–20, 110. The most recent English edition of Huizinga’s work is more accurately translated as The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago: 1996); for the broader issue see Howard Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis: the Burden of the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Early Modern History 4 (2000): 85–125; John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church,” Church History 77 (2008): 257–284. 20 Winfried Eberhard, Ferdinand Seibt (eds.), Europa 1400: Die Krise des Spätmittelalters (Stuttgart: 1984). 19
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ping fire and snakes.21 There was never a figure in Poland like Tetzel, who could personify all the problems of a corrupt and failing institution that had lost touch with the common person. The model of decline also distorts by setting a trajectory that forces a specific conclusion. Crisis and decay must find some type of resolution. A phoenix always rises from the ashes. For the religious historian that phoenix has customarily been the Reformation when decline is reversed and the old restored by youth. With a terminus ad quem at the Reformation, the confessional developments of the 14th and 15th centuries are inevitably seen as necessary to the groundbreaking innovations of Luther, Calvin, and Loyola. In western Europe, Waldensians and Lollards become the familiar “forerunners” of later reform movements. In Central Europe that role is often filled by the Hussites. The most recent survey in English on early Hussitism refers to the movement as Bohemia’s “first Reformation”.22 While certainly there was a sense in which the efforts of Hus foreshadowed the later work of Luther, and though there was a branch of this church sympathetic to Lutheran ideas in the 16th century, ecclesiastical historians have frequently reduced Utraquism to a pale precursor of Protestantism. Too often, the confessional complexity of Central Europe before 1500 is artificially adjusted and even simplified to account for the changes of the Reformation. If Central Europe’s religious terrain is more variegated than most scholars allow, how then should we understand the Reformation itself? The story of the Polish noble, Stanisław Orzechowski (1513– 1566), is particularly instructive here. Born in what is today eastern Poland, Orzechowski followed a trajectory common to many of the Polish elite. In his youth he studied in Vienna, Padua, and Wittenberg. When he returned home, he became a priest but married shortly thereafter. Did his marriage reflect the influence of Luther or other
21 See, for example, the 1547 catechism of Martynas Mažvydas where the Reformer condemns the worship of the pagan god Perkunas, cited in Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion (Berkeley: 1999), 508. For the work of the Jesuits who complained that their flock still worshipped both trees and snakes, see Kazimierz Drzymała, “Praca jezuitów nad ludnością wiejską w pierwszym stuleciu osiedlenia się zakonu w Rzeczypospolitej,” Nasza Przeszłość 20 (1964): 51–75. For the actual illustration from Münster, see Laimonas Briedis, Vilnius City of Strangers (Budapest: 2009). 22 Thomas Fudge, The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Aldershot, UK: 1998).
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reformers he encountered on his travels? The answer is a resolute no, for Orzechowski became a great critic of Protestantism. His model of reform, in contrast, came from the Orthodox community where priests could marry and the laity could receive both the bread and cup at the Eucharist.23 Orzechowski illustrates the necessity of viewing the religious changes of the 16th and 17th centuries not as a dialogue between Protestant and Catholic but as a far broader conversation between a variety of confessional groups. To understand the Reformation aright, scholars must begin by recognizing the multi-polarity of religious life in this period. Utraquism provides the perfect example, for this religious movement in its classical sense was certainly not Protestant. The adoration of the host, the veneration of images and relics, and the belief in the intercessory power of the saints were all retained. The church hierarchy continued to affirm apostolic succession. Even after the split with Rome, Utraquist leaders sought out sympathetic bishops to ordain their priests. As with the Orthodox, there were provisions for married clergy, and of course the practice of receiving the Eucharist in both the bread and the chalice (sub utraque specie) was the most prominent feature of its worship. Foreign visitors to Bohemia were often quite confused with what they found in the Utraquist churches they attended in the 16th century. Lutherans expecting to discover likeminded Protestants were surprised and disappointed by the “papist” character of these parishes. Conversely, visiting Catholics were frequently bemused by the odd ecclesiastical rites and rituals they encountered on their travels.24 This confusion remains today. Though there is a significant body of recent work on Utraquism in its later period, scholars still cannot define with any real degree of precision the exact nature of this church.25 While there was a central consistory in Prague and a limited set of core beliefs and practices, Utraquism was certainly not monolithic and can in no sense be easily compartmentalized. The religious
23 Most recent on Orzechowski is Krzysztof Koehler, Stanisław Orzechowski i dylematy humanizmu (Cracow: 2004). 24 Jaroslav Pánek, “Čechy, Morava a Lužice v německém cestopisů ze sklonku 16. století,” Folia Historica Bohemica 13 (1990): 221; Eliška Fučíková (ed.), Tři francouzští kavalíři v rudolfínské Praze (Prague: 1989), 44–5. 25 Most recently is Zdeněk David, Finding a Middle Way: the Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther (Baltimore: 2003). Though the text should be read with some caution, David’s work does point to the vitality of traditional Utraquism in the sixteenth century.
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landscape of late-16th- and early-17th-century Bohemia becomes even more perplexing when we consider the other confessional groups that existed alongside the Utraquists. Representative is the travel account of the Englishman Fynes Moryson who visited the Czech lands in the 1590s and reported: Generally in the kingdome there was great confusion of Religions, so as in the same Citty some were Calvinists, some Lutherans, some Hussites, some Anabaptists, some Picards [Bohemian Brethren], some Papists . . . Yea the same confusion was in all the villages, and even in most of the private Familyes, among those who lived at one table, and rested in one bed together. For I have often seene servants wayte upon their masters to the Church dore, and then leave them to goe to another Church.26
Multiconfessionalism, then, was a fundamental characteristic of religious life in Central Europe throughout the early modern period. But while we recognize the multi-polarity of the Christian community, we must also consider another distinguishing feature of this region. Over time a type of confessional hybridity developed as these groups interacted with one another. Polish Calvinists, for example, adopted a number of practices that would have certainly raised eyebrows in Geneva. They observed days of patron saints and promoted a modest cult of the Virgin. Their anti-Trinitarian neighbors considered them little better than Catholics!27 The emergence of smaller groups, such as the Sabbatarians, reflected an even stranger admixture of belief and practice. Rejecting Sunday in favor of the Jewish Sabbath, the earliest Sabbatarians were a radical sect of Anabaptists. A later group emerged in Hungary towards the end of the 16th century within the Unitarian community. Influenced by Judaism, they viewed the New Testament akin to the Talmud, a type of commentary on the law of God revealed in Hebrew Scripture.28 More typical were the Orthodox communities of Ruthenia. Here we must deal with two variants of Orthodoxy. Its most hybrid form, the Uniate church, emerged from the 1596/7 Union of Brest, when 26 Cited in David Holeton, “Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary: A Sixteenth Century English Traveller’s Observations on Bohemia, its Reformation, and its Liturgy” in Z. David and D. Holeton (eds.), The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice vol. 5, no. 2 (Prague, 2005): 390–1. 27 Janusz Tazbir, A State Without Stakes (New York: 1973), 128. 28 The definitive source remains Samuel Kohn, Die Sabbatharier in Siebenbürgen (Budapest: 1894).
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its leaders recognized Roman supremacy but retained their Orthodox rites. There has been significant debate regarding the Uniates. Scholarly opinion ranges from those who see the community as an embodiment of a long tradition of ecumenism that had begun at the Council of Florence in 1439 to those who argue that the church was an artificial creation, a product more of political necessity than any profound impulse for ecclesiastical reunion.29 This very contention concerning the nature of the Kievan church is in itself an illustration of its hybridity. Though before Brest its allegiance was with the Patriarchate of Constantinople, this did not exclude the church from participating in the councils of the west. The hierarchs of Kiev had been involved at the councils of Lyon (1245), Constance (1415), and, of course, Florence (1439). While the Orthodox of Muscovy used Florence as an opportunity to portray themselves as an ecclesiastical community with a pronounced anti-Latin orientation, the status of the Kievan metropolitanate after 1439 does not fit into such neat and tidy confessional categories (Greek-Latin, east-west, Orthodox-Catholic). In true Central European fashion, this faith community reflected the influence of both east and west.30 The other Orthodox community in Ruthenia, the one that refused union with Rome, is also intriguing. One might assume that this church, like its Muscovite cousin, responded to the Union of Brest by defining itself over and against the ecclesiastical culture of the west. Interestingly, this did not occur. Though there was no agreement with Rome, there was still a type of confessional permeability that was relatively rare for Orthodox/Catholic interaction in the premodern period—something that we certainly do not see happening in Muscovy.31 The impulse that led to the Union of Brest also prompted a revival in the old Orthodox community. Critical here was the reform work of Kiev’s future metropolitan, Peter Mohyla, whose efforts at reviving eastern Orthodoxy followed a model that was not Greek and Slavonic
29 Oskar Halecki, From Florence to Brest (1439–1596) (Hamden, CT: 1968); Ihor Mončak, Florentine Ecumenism in the Kyivan Church (Rome: 1987); Borys Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: the Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, MA: 1998). 30 Borys Gudziak, “The Union of Florence in the Kievan metropolitanate: Did it survive until the times of the Union of Brest?,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 17 (1993): 138–48. 31 For a critical point of contrast with Muscovy, see Max Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early Modern Russia (Leiden: 1995).
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but Latin and Polish. For the training of clergy he established one of the most important theological academies in the Orthodox world, a school that was very much a hybrid institution.32 As Ihor Ševčenko has observed, “By combining its Western tinge and its Latino-Polish message with Orthodoxy, Mohyla’s collegium performed a double task: it provided an alternative to the outright Polonization of the Ukrainian elite, and it delayed its Russification until well after 1686.” Muscovite reports support this contention. Their representatives complained that the Orthodox of Ruthenia were far too western in their theological orientation, for their priests devoted too much time to the Latin texts of Jerome and Augustine and not enough to the Greek treatises of Chrysostom and Basil.33 16th-century Poland: A Case Study At this juncture let us shift our focus to one specific setting for a closer examination of these more general themes that characterized religious life in Central Europe. Here we will turn to 16th-century Poland. English-language historiography of the Polish Reformation remains remarkably thin and reflects many of the problems already noted. Paul Foxe’s slim study, The Reformation in Poland (1924), is the last full monograph dedicated to the subject. A later generation of historians devoted significant attention to the kingdom’s anti-Trinitarians, whom they viewed as early champions of religious freedom and tolerance. More recent scholarship has investigated how the work and writings of these early figures contributed to the development of Enlightenment thought.34 This exception aside, there has been surprisingly little interest in the fascinating world of the Polish Reformation. No other 32 P. V. Holobuts’kyi, N. I. Moiseienko, Z. I. Khyzhniak (eds.), Petro Mohyla, 1596– 1647: bibliohrafichnyi pokazhchyk (Kyïv: 2003); M. Korzo, “Prawosławne wyznanie wiary Piotra Mohyły. Kilka uwag w sprawie wpływów zachodnich na teologię kijowską XVII w.,” Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce 46 (2002): 141–149; P. Lewin, “A select bibliography of publications on the Kiev Mohyla Academy by Polish scholars, 1966– 1983,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8 (1984): 223–8; Téofil Ionescu, La vie et l’oeuvre de Pierre Movila, Metropolite de Kiev (Paris: 1944). 33 Ihor Ševčenko, Ukraine between East and West (Edmonton: 1996), 145, 184; more recently, see Liudmila Charipova, Latin Books and the Eastern Orthodox Clerical Elite in Kiev, 1632–1780 (Manchester: 2006). 34 Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: 1945– 52); G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: 1962); Martin Mulsow, Jan Rohls (eds.), Socinianism and Arminianism (Leiden: 2005).
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region on the continent could match the confessional diversity of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Before the 16th century there were Catholic, Orthodox, Armenian, and Utraquist communities. Afterward came Calvinists, Lutherans, Anabaptists, the Bohemian Brethren, an assortment of anti-Trinitarians, and other radical groups. And then of course there were various non-Christian communities, including the sizable Jewish population as well as Muslim Tatars. There was even a Karaite settlement that had grown up around the lakes of the old Lithuanian capital of Trakai. The 17th-century British traveler, Edwin Sandys, was hardly exaggerating when he observed “if somebody has lost his confession in his homeland, he should come to Poland and find it there; if not, however, it would mean that the confession of his choice exists nowhere in the world.”35 The multiconfessional nature of Polish society in the Reformation era was a product of factors already discussed. Most significant among them was the region’s political decentralization. A weak king and a strong but divided nobility helped create the space where a variety of Christian groups could co-exist. Indeed, any discussion of the Reformation here must begin with the nobility, for in this respect Poland truly stood apart from its neighbors. Though cities such as Cracow and Danzig contributed in their own way to the spread of Protestant ideas, the Reformation in Poland was not an urban event as it was in Germany. At the same time it never became a popular movement in the sense of mass peasant support and rural discontent.36 Though Sigismund the Old (1506–48) was theologically engaged, and his son Sigismund II Augustus (1548–72) purportedly had a servant read aloud from Calvin’s Institutes before retiring to bed, the Polish Reformation cannot truly be considered a courtly phenomenon, for it never received royal sanction as in England. It was first and foremost a debate among the region’s elites. It was a discussion of ideas or as one scholar has
35 From Edwin Sandys, A Relation of the State of Religion (London: 1605), cited in Paweł Kras, “Religious Tolerance in the Jagiellonian Policy during the Age of the Reformation (The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth)” in Dietmar Popp and Robert Suckale (eds.), Die Jagiellonen: Kunst und Kultur einer europäischen Dynastie an der Wende zur Neuzeit (Nuremberg: 2002), 131. 36 For a discussion of the peasants, see Tomasz Wiślicz, Zarobić na duszne zbawienie. Religijność chłopów małopolskich od połowy XVI do końca XVIII wieku (Warsaw, 2001).
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recently put it “a grand intellectual adventure”.37 The structural distinctiveness of Poland’s Reformation thus offers the historian a unique vantage point from which to view confessional change in 16th-century Central Europe. Though the German Peasants War, the Henrican Revolution in England, or the Wars of Religion in France illustrate the extent to which religious reform was so closely intertwined with broader political, social, and cultural phenomena, the situation was somewhat different in Poland. I do not claim, of course, that the Polish gentry had no desire to use religion for political gain, but I would contend that the Reformation here was primarily ideological, as religious leaders of all stripes argued and disputed key theological issues of the era. Poland, in fact, was home to the most creative and inventive discussions on the Trinity since the Christological controversies of the patristic period.38 The massive controversial literature these reformers produced in their hard-fought battles over Scripture, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical authority is invaluable for historians tracking the confessional evolution not just of Central Europe but the continent itself, for it offers us one of the clearest and least obscured views of religious change in the 16th century. Jerzy Kłoczowski has reminded us how young Christianity was in late 15th-century Poland, while it must not be forgotten that Lithuania had only officially exchanged its pagan gods and sacred groves for the Trinity and the cathedral a century earlier.39 Now under the spell of humanism, leaders in both church and state turned to the future flush with optimism as they engaged new ideas of reform. The individual who had the greatest impact shaping this fresh outlook on religion and society was the arch-humanist himself, Desiderius Erasmus. When Erasmus wrote Bishop Warham in 1524, “Polonia mea est,” he was making no idle boast. In the early16th century, he exercised considerable influence at the royal court, the university, the episcopal palace, and with many of the country’s great magnates. There are 95 extant letters between Erasmus and a
37 See the jacket of Janusz Tazbir, Reformacja-kontrreformacja-tolerancja (Wrocław: 1997). 38 George Williams, “Strains in the Christology of the Emerging Polish Brethren” in S. Fiszman (ed.), The Polish Renaissance in its European Context (Bloomington, IN: 1988), 61–95. 39 Jerzy Kłoczowski, Młodsza Europa: Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w kręgu cywilizacji chrześcijańskiej średniowiecza (Warsaw: 1998).
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Polish interlocutor.40 It should not be surprising, then, that the kingdom’s three most important reformers all began their careers as committed Erasmians. Their subsequent trajectories, however, were very different. A brief comparison offers revealing insights into the growth and development of Poland’s multiconfessional society. Johannes a Lasco (1499–1560) Of all the major leaders of the Reformation, none came from a more privileged background than Johannes a Lasco (Łaski).41 His uncle was a close ally of King Sigismund and served both as royal chancellor and primate of Poland. The uncle kept a close eye on his young nephew and made sure that Johannes received an education fitting for his station. He studied four years in Bologna and Padua before returning to Poland, where he was ordained in 1521 and then appointed a secretary in the royal chancellery. He later accompanied his two brothers on diplomatic missions to the west where he continued his studies in Paris and was introduced to the court of Marguerite of Navarre. It was in Basel, however, that he had the most significant encounter of his life. Here a Lasco met Desiderius Erasmus with whom he lived for several months. It is difficult to underestimate Erasmus’s influence on the impressionable Polish noble. A Lasco wrote years later that it was during this period that Erasmus taught him the meaning of “true religion”. He facilitated Erasmus’ contact with other Polish nobles, including King Sigismund, and helped negotiate the sale of the Dutchman’s extensive library that was to be shipped to Poland upon his death.42 A Lasco returned to Poland in 1526. His future looked bright, and he may have gone on to rival his uncle’s success, were it not for a disastrous political decision his family made following the
40 P. S. Allen (ed.), Opus epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami (Oxford: 1906–58), 5: #1488, 535; George Williams, “Erasmianism in Poland,” Polish Review, 22 (1977): 3–50; Maria Cytowska (ed.), Korespondencja Erazma z Rotterdamu z Polakami (Warsaw: 1965). 41 The historiography on a Lasco is extensive, complicated and generally fractured along national lines. For a representative sampling of recent scholarship, see the edited volume, Christoph Strohm (ed.), Johannes a Lasco (1499–1560). 42 Ambroise Jobert, De Luther à Mohila (Paris: 1974), 97–8; Konstanty Zantuan, “Erasmus and the Cracow Humanists: The Purchase of his Library by Laski,” Polish Review 10 (1965): 3–36.
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battle of Mohács, when the Turks routed a Hungarian army and killed its last Jagiellonian king. Following the disaster, the brothers actively supported the claim of János Zsigmond Zápolyai for the Hungarian throne. Polish King Sigismund, who favored his ally Ferdinand, the Habsburg candidate, was not pleased, and it quickly became apparent that a Lasco’s prospects for advancement in Central Europe were limited. Denied a career within Poland, he travelled abroad where his religious views continued to evolve as he was slowly drawn towards the Reformed church. He had his first great success when Countess Anna von Oldenburg appointed him superintendant of the church of East Frisia in 1543. Seven years later Edward VI invited him to organize a church for the many Protestant refugees who had come to London for safe haven. After Edward’s death he travelled back to the continent and a brief stay in Germany before his final call to Poland in 1556, where he established the Calvinist church in Lesser Poland and Lithuania. The activity of Johannes a Lasco reflects the eclectic nature of Polish Protestantism. A late convert to the new faith, a Lasco’s theological views developed slowly and were shaped by extensive interaction with a broad range of interlocutors. His list of friends and mentors reads like a Who’s Who of the Protestant Reformation. Ulrich Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, Martin Bucer, Hermann von Wied, Philip Melanchthon, Thomas Cranmer, John Calvin, and Heinrich Bullinger all exercised some influence on his thought. In this respect he was ideally suited to deal with the multi-polar world of Polish Protestantism. It was Erasmus, of course, who had the greatest impact on his understanding of Christianity. Some might even argue that a Lasco is what Erasmus would have looked like had the Dutchman eventually converted. Whatever the case, a Lasco represents the most ecumenical wing of the Reformed tradition. As one of the great leaders of international Calvinism, he was remarkably non-theological. Like Erasmus, he believed that a simple rule of faith was sufficient and the best way to guard the church’s purity and integrity. There was no need to develop more complicated confessional standards when the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed were used. On issues such as free will, original sin, and Christology, a Lasco was actually closer to Erasmus than Calvin. It is significant that his few ventures into theology were not successful. His Summary of the Doctrine of the Church of East Frisia (1544) was received critically by Bullinger and Melanchthon. Later, he engaged in
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a heated debate with the Swabian Reformer Johannes Brenz concerning the Eucharist. Most judged that a Lasco came out the loser. It was not on doctrinal matters that a Lasco left his mark but on issues of order and discipline. Here his legacy within the Reformed tradition is frankly unrivalled. It can be argued that by the time of his death in 1560, it was not Calvin but a Lasco who was most responsible for the dramatic geographical expansion of Reformed Protestantism. Ever pragmatic, a Lasco effectively sized up a situation and developed practical and effective solutions to the problems he faced. His first great challenge came organizing the church of East Frisia. Individual congregations had significant power and independence. A Lasco was able to impose a more ordered system without alienating the churches. He instituted the coetus, a weekly meeting of the clergy, which helped bring the various congregations together while still allowing a range of theological views to exist within the church.43 His assignment in London was more difficult. As the city filled with religious refugees from France and the Low Countries, there was a pressing need to establish a church for this population. Edward VI established such a body in 1550 and called a Lasco to lead it. The Pole faced challenges on two fronts. He had to defend the church from without, for the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, had opposed it from the onset, arguing that this congregation should fall under his jurisdiction and follow the English rite. Internally, a Lasco had to devise a church order that could satisfy a range of theological positions. The resulting statement, The Form and Manner of Ecclesiastical Ministry, was one of his greatest triumphs, reflecting a simple Biblicism on doctrinal matters while adapting a flexible but democratic structure of church governance.44 It was this pragmatic spirit that a Lasco brought with him when he returned to Poland to organize the Protestant church. Though his work was cut short by his death in 1560, he endeavored to bring the kingdom’s major Protestant groups into a broad union. A decade later this ideal was realized when the kingdom’s Lutheran, Reformed, and Brethren communities came together through the Consensus of Sandomierz.
43
Best here is Henning P. Jürgens, Johannes a Lasco in Ostfriesland (Tübingen: 2002). 44 Michael Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church: John a Lasco and the Forma ac ratio (Aldershot, UK: 2007).
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Stanislaus Hosius (1504–1579) Though five years younger than Johannes a Lasco, his Protestant sparring partner, Stanislaus Hosius was a product of a similar intellectual environment. His social origins, however, were significantly different. His father Ulrich was a German artisan who found employment tending the grounds of the royal castle in Vilnius, where Stanislaus passed his childhood.45 A precocious student, he began his studies at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow in 1519. Like a Lasco, Hosius quickly fell under the spell of Erasmus. At the university he heard lectures from the Englishman Leonard Coxe who first introduced Erasmus to a Polish audience. Distinguishing himself in his studies, Hosius attracted the attention of Piotr Tomicki, bishop of Cracow and vice-chancellor of the kingdom. Attached now to the episcopal court, Hosius enjoyed the patronage of the powerful Tomicki and was an active member of an Erasmian circle in Cracow through the 1520s. In 1527 he wrote a preface to a letter Erasmus had written King Sigismund, which was then published in the Polish capital.46 The climax of Hosius’s humanist phase came in the early 1530s, when Tomicki sent his young charge to Bologna and Padua to round out his formal education. According to his first biographer, Stanislaus Rescius, Hosius had hoped to end his travels abroad with a visit to Erasmus. The meeting never occurred, for Hosius was robbed enroute, an event that Rescius claimed was a clear act of divine providence!47 The encounter that never took place was an important parting of the ways for a Lasco and Hosius. As they entered their mature years, they developed alternative strategies for managing the challenges of multiconfessionalism. While a Lasco believed that union could be achieved through broad doctrinal statements combined with a well-ordered plan of ecclesiastical discipline, Hosius was decidedly more skeptical. His views were far closer to those of a 16th-century visitor, travelling through Poland, who when confronted with such a broad spectrum of religious beliefs noted “the collission of dyvers opinions (are) easely corrupting, if not altogeather 45 For a biographical overview, see G. H. Williams, “Stanislas Hosius” in Jill Raitt (ed.), Shapers of Religious Traditions in Germany, Switzerland and Poland 1560–1600 (New Haven: 1981), 157–174. 46 Des. Erasmi Roterodami Epistola ad inclytum Sigismundum regem Poloniae (Cracow: 1527). 47 S. Rescius, D. Stanislai Hosii . . . vita, in F. Hipler and V. Zakrzewski (eds.), Acta historica res gestas Poloniae illustranti (Cracow: 1879), 4:x.
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extinguishing the religious affection of mans mynde.”48 For Hosius, the problems of multiconfessionalism demanded a firmer and more robust response. In contrast to a Lasco, who presumed that a range of religious belief and practice could harmoniously co-exist within a broad Protestant alliance, Hosius contended that such an attitude was both naïve and dangerous. One of his early tracts addressed three of the most common issues raised by Protestant reformers: marriage of the clergy, communion in two kinds, and the use of the vernacular during worship. On all three of these matters Hosius vigorously supported the church’s traditional position.49 He was convinced that variation in such practices eventually led to doctrinal confusion and ultimately ecclesiastical chaos. In similar fashion he noted that new translations of Scripture have “turned not only strapmakers, porters, bakers, tailors, and cobblers, but even their wives, into Apostles, Prophets, and doctors and has removed all order from the Church of God.”50 For Hosius the great catastrophe precipitated by Luther and Calvin was first and foremost a crisis of authority. The church could only recover its former health by confronting this problem directly. Of all Catholic reformers, it may have been Hosius who was most keenly attuned to this issue due to his own experience in Poland, and throughout his multi-faceted career he worked to strengthen and reinforce the church’s hierarchical structure of authority. As bishop in Poland, cardinal in Rome, papal legate in Vienna, and president at the Council of Trent, Hosius consistently sought ways to buttress the power of the pope and the rights and prerogatives that then flowed down to the bishops. Hosius’s remarkably broad career also reminds us that the multiconfessional world of Central Europe is best understood from a transnational perspective. Growing up in a bi-lingual household helped prepare him for the challenges of a multi-ethnic society. The diocese of Warmia, which he eventually oversaw, was in fact predominantly German. Hosius believed that religious reform had to be addressed outside a national context. In his Confessio Catholicae fidei Christiana (1551), an eloquent summary of
48 Cited in Waldemar Kowalski, “From the ‘Land of Diverse Sects’ to National Religion” in A. Pettegree (ed.), The Reformation (London: 2004), 4:321. 49 S. Hosius, Dialogus de eo, num calicem laicis, et uxores sacerdotibus permitti (Dillingen: 1559). 50 Cited in David Frick, Polish Sacred Philology in the Reformation and the CounterReformation (Berkeley: 1989), 39.
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Catholic doctrine, he simply stated, “Faith is not Polish, not Lithuanian, not German.”51 Andreas Fricius Modrevius (1503–1572) Unlike Hosius and a Lasco, who have an international reputation in scholarly circles today, our final figure is not well known outside Poland. But within his native land, Andreas Fricius Modrevius is traditionally viewed as a central figure of the Polish Renaissance.52 Modrevius’s family came from a village in Greater Poland. His father held the hereditary title of mayor. He sent his son off to Cracow where he entered the university in 1517. There he first made the acquaintance of Stanislaus Hosius. Their paths would cross many times in the future, climaxing with a lengthy exchange of polemical literature in the middle of the century. Modrevius’s first official post came at the court of primate Jan Łaski, Johannes a Lasco’s learned uncle. At his death Modrevius transferred his services to nephew Johannes and his two other brothers, Jerome and Stanislaus. It was through these brothers that Modrevius was introduced to the world of German Protestantism. Serving as an emissary of the a Lasco family abroad, Modrevius set up a base in Wittenberg where he lived with Melanchthon. Though sympathetic to many Reformation ideas, he did not convert. After Erasmus’s death in 1536, it was Modrevius who organized the transport of his library to Poland. Modrevius eventually attracted royal attention as well. The height of his influence came during the reign of Sigismund II Augustus who used him as both a diplomat and an advisor. While both Hosius and a Lasco eventually found a career in the church, Modrevius did not, which may explain why his view of reform was markedly broader than both of his peers. Of all three, he remained most committed to a humanist agenda as reflected in a figure like Erasmus. Modrevius envisioned a general reformation of his world, one that affected all branches of society including the church. His first published work, Lascius sive de poena homicidii oratio prima
51 Cited in H. D. Wojtyska, “Stanislaus Hosius (1504–1579)” in E. Iserloh (ed.), Katholische Theologen der Reformationszeit (Münster: 1988), 150. 52 The fullest assessment of Modrevius and his works is offered in A. Séguenny and W. Urban, Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, (Bibliotheca dissidentium) 18 (Baden-Baden: 1997).
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(Cracow, 1543), was a blistering critique of a Polish legal system that meted out punishments on the basis of social rank. Two year later he wrote a short treatise defending the property rights of townspeople. His most important work Commentariorum de Republica emendanda libri quinque (Basel, 1554) was a massive and far-reaching reflection on society, government, law, and religion. It was this final work that brought him fame. The text was translated into Polish, German, French, and Spanish and elicited praise and criticism from the likes of Jean Bodin, Johannes Althusius, Hugo Grotius, and Pierre Bayle. Modrevius first published on ecclesiastical matters in 1546 with a tract on the Council of Trent. King Sigismund had actually appointed him to attend the council, though in the end a Polish delegation never arrived. Nevertheless, Modrevius’s brief treatise represents the highpoint of a strong conciliarist tradition in Poland. He appealed to the memory of the Council of Basel (1431–1449), where Poles played a significant role at the convocation.53 He feared that Trent was mere window-dressing, with the church publicly proclaiming what it had decided long beforehand. “Those who are to be sent to the council,” he averred, “should truly debate and discuss.”54 This was the first salvo in what turned into a protracted polemical feud with Hosius. Modrevius followed up this initial blast with a series of tracts, promoting a typical humanist agenda of church reform: abolition of clerical celibacy, communion in two kinds, and use of the vernacular. With his emphasis on education, the authority of Scripture, and an optimistic view of human nature that bordered on Pelagianism, Modrevius remained closest in spirit to Erasmus throughout his career. He focused consistently on issues of morality while seeking to minimize theological difference. He often claimed that Protestants and Catholics were closer than they realized on matters of doctrine. He was convinced that agreement could be found on questions of sin, salvation, and Christology. Idealistic and naïve, Modrevius quickly found his way blocked by Hosius and his allies within the church. Out maneuvered by his opponent in Cracow, he had to publish his commentary on the church (book four 53 Thomas Wünsch, Konziliarismus und Polen (Paderborn: 1998); Paul Knoll, “The university of Cracow and the conciliar movement” in J. Kittelson and P. Transue (eds.), Rebirth, Reform and Resilience: Universities in Transition, 1300–1700 (Columbus, OH: 1984), 190–212. 54 A.F. Modrevius, De legatis ad concilium mittendis, vol. 2 in C. Kumaniecki (ed.), Andreae Fricii Modrevii opera omnia (Warsaw: 1954), 181.
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of the Commentarium) in Basel. Now facing the wrath of Rome as well, Modrevius slowly withdrew from public life. He continued writing from his rural home, where his criticism of the church became ever more vigorous. He grew bolder as he attacked purgatory, prayers for the dead, and transubstantiation. But for all that, he never left the church. He wrote, “I remain a citizen of the Commonwealth, though I cannot approve of many of its laws; . . . similarly, I have not ceased being a member of the Church, though I cannot embrace its rites or teachings in their entirety.”55 It was his great hope that Sigismund II Augustus would call a national council, but unlike Trent, which he saw as a sham, this gathering would truly be inclusive and democratic. Reflecting on the multiconfessional nature of his homeland, he dreamed of a council that would bring together members of the kingdom’s different Christian communities in a spirit of charity and harmony. Conclusion The intertwined lives of Modrevius, a Lasco, and Hosius reveal much about multiconfessionalism, most directly in Poland but also in the wider world of Central Europe. Modrevius represents a humanist approach to religious reform, a position common to many church leaders in the early-16th century.56 But as the decades wore on, Modrevius found himself increasingly isolated and his views progressively scorned. Not only did he provoke the great controversy with Hosius, but his once friendly relations with a Lasco also became strained. When he waded into the early Christological controversies to mediate a growing rift within the Reformed camp, Calvin came out openly against him. Ironically, his last work, a humanist consideration of the Trinity, where he carefully worked through Scripture and the debates of the early church, was published posthumously with the assistance of Poland’s most marginal Christian community, the anti-Trinitarian
55 Cited in Adam Ulam, “Andreas Fricius Modrevius—A Polish Political Theorist of the Sixteenth Century,” The American Political Science Review 40 (1946): 487. 56 John D’Amico, “Humanism and Pre-Reformation Theology” in A. Rabil (ed.), Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy (Philadelphia: 1988), 3:349– 379.
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Polish Brethren.57 The career of Johannes a Lasco highlights a fundamental dilemma of Protestantism in Central Europe. This was a multi-polar world where confessional divisions were not always clearly demarcated. As such, it was a region where ecumenism flourished, where agreements could be negotiated even between unlikely partners, such as the fascinating attempt at Vilnius in 1599 to bring the Orthodox and Calvinists together.58 But this lack of theological clarity was also a liability, leaving some communities without a clear sense of identity. Those who converted to Protestantism could just as easily convert back to Catholicism, and many did. A Lasco’s vaunted skills of organization were not enough to create a well-disciplined and united Protestant front. In the end it may have been Stanislaus Hosius who best understood the psychology of religious life in Central Europe. He had long asserted that Protestant demands such as the Eucharist in two kinds were mere pretexts for division, and throughout his career he pointed to what he perceived as this community’s most troubling weakness, a congenital tendency to fissure and split into ever smaller subgroups. He believed that Modrevius’s reform program threatened the church, for its democratic constitution would dilute authority and create greater confusion in the minds of ordinary believers. Hosius’s greatest strength was his ability to clarify. His Confessio was a remarkable distillation of Catholic teaching, and in all his writings he consistently emphasized the importance of hierarchy and authority. It was this vision of ecclesiastical order that finally carried the day. Its organization and discipline were most congenial to the needs of the early modern state, and Protestants, too, eventually adapted structural elements of this model. Though the region’s multiconfessional character persisted into the 17th century, the great era of religious diversity slowly faded as the state and church reshaped their relationship to meet the challenges of a new political and social environment.
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Andreae Fricii Modrevii Secretarii Regii Sylvae Quattor (Cracow: 1590). Marian Bendza, “Orthodox-protestantische Unionstendenzen im 16. Jahrhundert in Polen,” Ostkirchliche Studien 34 (1986): 3–16. 58
MULTICONFESSIONALISM IN TRANSYLVANIA Graeme Murdock Writing about the political and social consequences of the Reformation has often focussed on the violence which followed the breakdown of religious uniformity across much of Europe. The international conflicts and civil wars of the 16th and 17th centuries have been seen as marking out a confessional age during which religious passions exacerbated struggles for power both between different states and within states. Monarchs fought abroad alongside co-religionists against religious and dynastic rivals, while rulers tried at home to eradicate any outbreaks of religious dissent. Ordinary people also became actively engaged at least as enthusiastic supporters of, as well as sometimes participants in, the violent persecution of religious minorities. Official and popular anxiety about the dangers posed to society by any diversity of religious beliefs and practices frequently resulted in the brutal treatment of heretics.1 However, across many parts of Europe even the most determined attempts to restore religious unity ended in failure. Many members of minority communities stubbornly resisted the appeals of official preachers and of printed propaganda. Even heresy trials, executions, pogroms, and forced exile were only partially successful in subduing dissent. Policies of religious persecution could also prove counter-productive, as alienated minorities were driven to outright political resistance against their rightful rulers. Civil conflict broke out in some territories, as normal patterns of obedience to lawful authorities were overwhelmed by rival religious loyalties. Despite the disruptive results of policies of religious persecution, many monarchs and magistrates remained more concerned about the perceived spiritual, social, and political dangers of sanctioning heresy. Secular authorities in many parts of the Continent continued to
1 Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riots in 16th-Century France,” Past and Present 59 (1973): 51–91; John Elliott, Europe Divided 1559–1598 (London: 1968); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490– 1700 (London: 2003); Geoffrey Parker, Europe in Crisis 1598–1648 (Oxford: 2001); David Sturdy, Fractured Europe, 1600–1721 (Oxford: 2002).
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work with clergy from official churches to promote orthodoxy and tried to eradicate religious diversity.2 However, some rulers who faced entrenched, determined, and substantial minority churches reluctantly adopted policies which sanctioned religious pluralism. Legal acceptance of confessional diversity within a state generally emerged from negotiated settlements between rulers and some of their most powerful subjects. In some territories compromises over religious rights were only reached after periods of conflict. In the Empire in 1555 and in the French monarchy from the early 1560s, rulers hoped to restore political stability by conceding specific and limited legal rights to Lutherans and Calvinists respectively. Elsewhere courts and nobles reached agreements in order to try to maintain order and peace. During the 1570s, legal rights were offered to a range of churches in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and in the lands of the Bohemian crown. The conversion of significant numbers of nobles and urban magistrates to Evangelical, Reformed and anti-Trinitarian churches was decisive in convincing monarchs of the necessity of offering some legal rights to non-Catholic churches. While these different multiconfessional regimes responded to political divisions and social instability, they also had the capacity to sustain and even inflame such divisions and instability.3 State recognition of confessional pluralism required rulers to have become convinced of the political necessity of accepting the existence of some minority religions. Multiconfessional states were built on grudging and hard-fought compromises. These settlements included some elements which may seem in tune with modern notions of religious liberty, but they operated alongside other elements which now
2 Kaspar von Greyerz, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800 (Oxford: 2008); John Headley, Hans Hillberbrand, and Anthony Papalas (eds.), Confessionalization in Europe, 1550–1700: Essays in honor and memory of Bodo Nischan (Aldershot: 2004); Wolfgang Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State. A Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989): 383–404; Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe” in Thomas Brady, Heiko Oberman, Jim Tracy (eds.), Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 2 (Leiden: 1994–5), 641–81. 3 Keith Cameron and Mark Greengrass (eds.), The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France (Bern: 2000); Joel Harrington and Helmut Smith, “Confessionalization, Community, and State- building in Germany, 1555–1870,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 77–101; Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich. Religiöser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620,” Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988): 1–45.
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seem restrictive and unattractive.4 Although multiconfessional states permitted some degree of religious diversity, they retained a strong culture which favoured conformity to a dominant church. Multiconfessional states extended legal rights and offered social inclusion to some religious groups but at the same time granted more restricted rights or gave no legal guarantees at all to other groups. For example, in the Empire Evangelical churches benefited from legal recognition under Lutheran princes after 1555, but no provision was made during the 16th century for Reformed princes and their churches lacked any legal protection. In France, legal restrictions stipulated where Reformed communities could and could not gain access to sites for public worship.5 Religious life and processes of religious reform were also profoundly influenced by multiconfessional environments. Consideration of whether or not to offer rights to minority churches often occurred during periods of religious fluidity. State recognition tended to ossify the nascent character of churches, and clerical hierarchies opposed any later internal impulses for further reform which might jeopardize hardwon legal privileges. Multiconfessional environments also affected the developing character of churches in other ways. Confessional competition changed the form in which clergy articulated doctrine, whether or not their church had won any legal liberties. In some contexts attempts to gain state recognition directly altered the doctrine adopted by different churches. For example, in 1575, rights were offered to Utraquist, Evangelical, and Bohemian Brethren nobles to practice their religion in Bohemia. However, the aristocratic patrons of these churches had first encouraged clergy to subscribe to a shared confession in order to advance negotiations with the Habsburg court.6
4
Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: 1997), 1–7. For disputes over control of sites of worship in France, see: Jérémie Foa, “An unequal apportionment: The conflict over space between Protestants and Catholics at the beginning of the war of religion,” French History 20 (2006): 369–86; Penny Roberts, “Contesting sacred space: burial disputes in 16th-century France” in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in late medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: 2000), 131–48. 6 František Kavka, “Bohemia” in Robert Scribner, Roy Porter, and Mikulás Teich (eds.), The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge, UK: 1994), 131–54; Jaroslav Pánek, “The Question of Tolerance in Bohemia and Moravia in the Age of the Reformation” in Ole Peter Grell and Robert Scribner (eds.), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge, UK: 1996), 262–81. 5
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This chapter will examine these key features of multiconfessional states by analysing the case-study of the Transylvanian principality. It will discuss the development and character of Transylvania as a multiconfessional state and society from the middle decades of the 16th century. It will focus first on how a series of political compromises were reached which offered different rights to a range of religions, and on how the state attempted to deal with the practical consequences for communities of sharing space between different churches. This chapter will then turn to consider the impact of this multiconfessional context on religious life. It will analyse the nature of multiconfessionalism in Transylvania by considering the emergence and development of the Unitarian or anti-Trinitarian church and its relations with other churches in the principality. Transylvania was a fledgling state during the era of Reformation. After the collapse of the medieval Hungarian kingdom in 1526, the province of Transylvania along with the so-called Partium counties of the eastern Hungarian plain remained outside the area occupied by Ottoman armies.7 The diet of this eastern remnant of the Hungarian kingdom elected a native noble, János Szapolyai, as their new monarch. Szapolyai’s power was challenged by Ferdinand Habsburg who was elected as king by a rival diet of nobles from northern and western Hungarian counties. In 1528, Szapolyai sought the protection of the Sultan to prevent any Habsburg invasion of his eastern kingdom. In 1538, a treaty, agreed between Ferdinand and Szapolyai, envisaged the unification of Christian Hungary under Habsburg control. However, in 1541, the eastern diet elected the infant János Zsigmond Szapolyai as their king and paid annual tribute to the Sultan in return for recognition of Szapolyai’s authority. In 1551, Ferdinand was able to secure agreement for Szapolyai’s abdication. This success for Habsburg policy proved short-lived as Ottoman armies advanced further north in 1552. In 1556, the diet of the eastern Hungarian lands including Transylvania once again recognised János Zsigmond Szapolyai as their elected king.8
7 The label Partium (partium regni Hungariae) refers to counties to the west of Transylvania proper which came under the authority of Transylvania’s rulers during this period. 8 Robert J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700: an Interpretation (Oxford: 1979); Márta Fata, Ungarn, das Reich, der Stephanskrone, im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung. Multiethnizität, Land und Konfession
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Unstable relations continued between these rival states during the middle decades of the 16th century, as ideas in favor of religious reform spread among German- and Hungarian-speakers. In 1568, the Ottoman Empire and Habsburg monarchy agreed on terms for peace at Adrianople, and Maximilian then revived efforts to re-unite Christian Hungary under Habsburg authority. Maximilian and János Zsigmond Szapolyai reached an agreement in 1570, by which Szapolyai renounced any claim on the Hungarian royal title in return for recognition from Maximilian of his rule as prince over Transylvania. The same agreement proposed the unification of Christian Hungary after the death of the childless Szapolyai. However, when Szapolyai died in 1571, the diet in Transylvania elected the Catholic noble István Báthory as their ruler. Báthory left Transylvania for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after his election as king in 1575 and subsequently appointed his relatives as governors of Transylvania. Zsigmond Báthory was elected as prince on István’s death in 1587. The resumption of war with the Ottomans during the 1590s brought renewed instability to the region. Zsigmond Báthory’s pro-Habsburg policy and erratic behaviour both proved disastrous for Transylvania which was invaded by Ottoman and Habsburg armies. Transylvanian autonomy was secured after a rebellion of eastern Hungarian nobles and militarized peasant bands led by the Reformed noble István Bocskai. Bocskai sought to defend traditional liberties and to prevent any extension of Habsburg power in the region. In 1605, he was elected prince by the Transylvanian diet, having already received recognition from the Porte. By the terms of the 1606 Vienna peace Rudolf II acknowledged him as prince of Transylvania and the counties of the Partium. Bocskai was the first in a series of Reformed nobles then elected by the diet to govern the Transylvanian principality during the 17th century.9 The Transylvanian principality emerged from, and survived, a series of political and military crises between the 1520s and early 1600s. It inherited a political culture which owed much to the traditions of the medieval Hungarian kingdom along with features which developed 1500 bis 1700. (Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung) 60 (Münster: 2000). 9 David Daniel, “The Fifteen Years’ War and Protestant Responses to Habsburg Absolutism in Hungary,” East Central Europe 8 (1981): 38–51; László Makkai, “István Bocskai’s Insurrectionary Army” in János Bak and Béla Király (eds.), From Hunyadi to Rákóczi. War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary (Brooklyn MA: 1982), 275–97.
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during the 16th century. For example, the principality’s single-chamber diet had its origins in a 1459 pact between Transylvania’s Hungarianspeaking nobles, German-speaking urban magistrates, and the lords of militarized Szekler communities. These so-called “nations” united to defend their interests against peasant rebels and external threats. The three “nations” formed a provincial diet which sent representatives to the Hungarian royal diet. From the 1520s this provincial diet provided the basis for the diet of the eastern Hungarian kingdom and then of the Transylvanian principality. From the 1540s, nobles from the Partium counties also attended the diet, as did court officials and invited “regalists”, drawn from leading noble families. As we have seen, claimants for royal and princely power sought election from this diet, a practice which reflected contemporary noble understanding of the reciprocal relationship between Hungary’s monarchs and its estates.10 The role of the diet was further enhanced in 1566 when János Zsigmond Szapolyai obtained the Sultan’s agreement that the diet should hold elections to decide their ruler. The political power of the diet also extended during the 1550s and 1560s into negotiating with princes over, and passing laws about, matters of religion. This meant that Transylvania’s diet became engaged in shaping religious policy just as Evangelical, Reformed, and anti-Trinitarian preachers were gaining support for their ideas among Hungarian-speaking aristocrats and in Hungarian- and German-speaking towns.11
10
Graeme Murdock, “ ‘Freely elected in fear’: Princely Elections and Political Power in Early Seventeenth-century Transylvania,” Journal of Early Modern History 7 (2003): 213–44; Zsolt Trócsányi, Az erdélyi fejedelemség korának országgyűlései (Adalék az erdélyi rendiség történetéhez) (Budapest: 1976); Mihály Zsilinszky, A magyar országgyűlések vallásügyi tárgyalásai a reformátiotól kezdve, 4 vols. (Budapest: 1880–97). 11 For some context about the Reformation in the region see: Mihály Bucsay, Der Protestantismus in Ungarn, 1521–1978. Ungarns Reformationskirchen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 1. Im Zeitalter der Reformation, Gegenreformation und katholischen Reform (Vienna: 1977); Maria Crăciun, Ovidiu Ghitta, and Graeme Murdock, “Religious Reform, Printed Books and Confessional Identity” in Maria Crăciun, Ovidiu Ghitta, and Graeme Murdock (eds.), Confessional Identity in East-Central Europe (Aldershot: 2002); Robert J. W. Evans, “Calvinism in East Central Europe: Hungary and Her Neighbours” in Menna Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford: 1985), 167–97; Graeme Murdock, “Eastern Europe” in Andrew Pettegree (ed.), The Reformation World (London: 2000), 190–210; Andrew Pettegree and Karin Maag, “The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe” in Karin Maag (ed.), The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe (Aldershot: 1997), 1–18; 1–30. István Keul, Early Modern Religious Communities in East-Central Europe. Ethnic Diversity, Denominational Plurality, and Corporative Politics in the Principality of Transylvania (1526–1691) (Leiden: 2009).
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Transylvania had long been not only a multi-lingual and multiethnic political community but also a multiconfessional society. The principality straddled the border between Latin and Eastern Christianity, and Romanian-speaking peasants mostly remained loyal to the Orthodox Church throughout this period. Rural Orthodox communities were particularly numerous in parts of southern and southwestern Transylvania, which was of long-term significance to the religious culture of those regions. Religious diversity was thus far from a novelty for many Transylvanian communities during the 16th century. However, there were few Romanian-speaking landowners and no Romanian-speaking “nation” represented in the diet. The free practice of Orthodoxy was only permitted as a privilege granted by successive kings and princes. The limited rights given to the Orthodox Church allowed both Evangelical and Reformed clergy to sponsor reform initiatives among Romanian-speakers. Protestants looked to have pliant Orthodox bishops and metropolitans appointed who would introduce reform measures, alter styles of ritual, and change points of doctrine. During the 1560s and 1570s, Orthodox clergy whose form of religion was not thought to be based on the Bible were threatened with expulsion from the country. However, attempts to disrupt the practice of Orthodoxy proved largely ineffective, with only very limited success in building a small Romanian-speaking Reformed church. There were also some later advances in the legal rights offered to Orthodoxy clergy in Transylvania. In 1609, prince Gábor Báthory lifted duties of serfdom from priests, enabling them to move more freely between their communities.12 Two other religious groups gained privileges to form specific settlements in Transylvania during the early-17th century. Prince Gábor Bethlen was motivated by the potential economic advantages of inviting a productive community of Anabaptist artisans to settle in the principality in 1621. He followed the same policy in 1623, when he offered a Jewish community the opportunity to move north from Ottoman-held lands. Bethlen attempted to attract Jewish settlers by promising that there would be no requirement to wear distinctive
12 For the decisions taken by Transylvania’s diet see: Sándor Szilágyi (ed.), Monumenta Comitialia Regni Transylvaniae. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek. Magyar Történelmi Emlékek Harmadik Osztály, 21 vols. (Budapest: 1875–1898), especially vol. 3, 118, 140, 240 [hereafter Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek]; Krista Zach, Orthodoxe Kirche und rumänisches Volksbewusstsein im 15. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: 1977).
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clothing which might distinguish the community from its Christian neighbors and lead to possible social tension.13 This law also reflected decades of regulatory experience in Transylvania, trying to accommodate religious diversity while attempting to restrict any potential for inter-communal violence. Across much of Europe political settlements which gave legal sanction to some religious diversity only followed periods of conflict. In Transylvania moves towards providing a legal basis for a multiconfessional society aimed to pre-empt any violent consequences arising from religious divisions. The potential threat of either an Ottoman invasion or a Habsburg take-over seems to have focussed attention among the elite on the importance of reaching a settlement between the competing rights of rival churches. The external political context of the fledgling state apparently impressed upon the Catholic court and upon Protestant nobles and urban magistrates the need to make compromises over religious matters. Transylvania’s political culture, the diverse character of the estates, and the relative weakness of the court were also important in determining responses to the spread of different ideas in favour of religious reform.14 There was also political opportunism among the elite, which both responded to, and accelerated, the declining fortunes of the Catholic church. In 1556, the estates and the Catholic regent for János Zsigmond Szapolyai agreed on the expropriation of all episcopal and monastic lands. Having Catholic property at its disposal bolstered the power of the regency council and encouraged nobles to support the Szapolyai court. Catholic institutional power was left gravely weakened after 1556, and many nobles who gained church lands thereafter had a direct interest in advocating the cause of reform.15 Alongside such political and practical considerations, many nobles and urban magistrates also provided apparently sincere support for the ideas promoted by reform-minded preachers. Despite the passage of heresy legislation against Lutherans during the 1520s, the observance of Evangelical religion quickly came to dominate the German-speaking 13 Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 8, 143–5; E. Jakab, “Erdély és az anabaptisták a xvii.–xviii. században,” Keresztény Magvető 11 (1876): 1–14. 14 Ludwig Binder, Grundlagen und Formen der Toleranz in Siebenbürgen bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: 1976); Katalin Péter, “Tolerance and Intolerance in 16th-century Hungary” in Grell and Scribner, Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, 249–61. 15 Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 64–5.
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or so-called Saxon towns. German-speaking ministers adopted the Augsburg Confession, and religious life in Saxon towns was re-organised under regulations published by Johannes Honter in 1547. Lutheranism also gained support among Hungarian-speaking nobles during the 1550s.16 In 1553, the diet granted the right to worship according to Evangelical rites. In 1557, a final, and perhaps pious, effort was made to encourage Catholic and Evangelical clergy to reconcile their views. The diet called for a synod to consider divisions over controversial points of doctrine. Until this synod reached some conclusion the diet allowed communities across the principality to worship either according to the ceremonies of the old church or according to those of the reformers.17 This appeal for clergy to overcome their doctrinal differences was soon dropped. At its 1558 meeting the diet accepted an autonomous Lutheran church within the state. Once appeals for unity failed, the diet quickly decided to bolster political stability by permitting limited religious diversity. It also tried to restrict the process of reform to Evangelical religion and, in 1558, issued a strict prohibition against a sect named as “sacramentarians”.18 Any hope that these decisions would be the last required to accommodate religious diversity proved short-lived. Among some Hungarian-speaking nobles and especially in the towns of the Partium support grew from the late 1550s for Reformed ideas about the sacraments. In 1564, the diet suggested that Evangelical and Reformed clergy should hold a debate to reconcile their differences. However, it quickly became clear that there was no likelihood of reaching any agreement between competing ideas about the form of Christ’s presence in the elements of Communion. In June 1564, the diet decided to act to preserve “the peace of the realm” by offering legal recognition to two separate Protestant churches. In its resolution the diet described one of these churches as that of the Saxon ministers of Sibiu (Hermannstadt), while the other was to be for the Hungarian ministers of Cluj (Kolozsvár). After 1564, Reformed religion gained more support among Hungarian-speaking communities in Transylvania, although
16 Johannes Honter, Kirchenordnungen aller Deutschen in Sybenbürgen (Kronstadt: 1547). Access to printed texts from the Reformation period is available from Graeme Murdock (adv. ed.), The Hungarian Reformation. Books from the National Széchényi Library, Hungary (Leiden: 2009). 17 Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 78. 18 Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 93.
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some Hungarian-speakers remained in the Evangelical church alongside their German-speaking co-religionists.19 Transylvania’s religious landscape continued to be unstable during the 1560s. Only a small minority of landowners remained loyal to the Catholic church, which brought the legal rights of Catholic priests into question. In 1566, the diet decided that any clergy who continued to practice idolatry or who maintained “the Pope’s learning” should be expelled from the country.20 At the same time controversy erupted among Reformed ministers about the nature of God and the doctrine of the Trinity. Anti-Trinitarian ideas received an audience at the court of János Zsigmond Szapolyai, partly thanks to the influence of Ferenc Dávid. Dávid had been the superintendent of the Hungarian-speaking Evangelical church and then became superintendent of the Reformed church, but, by the late 1560s, he was the most prominent domestic figure in an emerging Unitarian church. We will return below to examine the emergence of anti-Trinitarianism in Transylvania and the impact on the church’s development of the principality’s multiconfessional environment. In 1568, the diet considered how to settle a pattern of religious rights in this fluid and complex environment. The diet was divided among supporters of Evangelical, Reformed, and Unitarian churches, and its deliberations were informed by a strongly anti-Catholic perspective. It decided that the only legitimate forms of Christianity were those that were based upon study of the Bible. A new law explained that legal protection would be granted only to ministers who “preach the Gospel according to their understanding of it”, and concluded that true “faith is a gift from God which comes from listening to the word of God”. The practical impact of this law confirmed the rights already granted to the Evangelical and Reformed churches. It also extended legal protection to anti-Trinitarian clergy whose doctrine was understood to be based on their interpretation of the Bible. At the same time the diet upheld its earlier decision to exclude Catholic clergy who were deemed not to preach God’s word.21 During the 1560s, a degree of religious diversity had been sanctioned by the state authorities for those ministers whose teaching was identi-
19 20 21
Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 226–7, 231–2. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 302–3. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 343.
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fied as being based on study of the Bible. This allowed for a variety of interpretations over how God related to the faithful through the sacraments and for different views among ministers about the nature of God. At the same time this multiconfessional settlement emphasized the dangers posed to society by idolatry. During the 1570s laws on religion also stressed the need to prevent the spread of any further doctrinal innovation. This anxiety about new heresies and blasphemies was particularly directed against some anti-Trinitarian clergy who began to question Christ’s divinity. The diet warned church superintendents to be vigilant about any preaching which might bring divine wrath down upon the principality. In 1572, the new Catholic ruler István Báthory confirmed the laws on religion that had been passed during the reign of his predecessor. Further resolutions by the diet stressed the need for stability within the Evangelical, Reformed, and Unitarian churches, and the importance of preventing further confessional changes or any new religious movements. If superintendents failed to act against internal dissent, then the secular authorities were empowered to imprison or execute any clergy who promoted doctrinal “innovation”, as well as to punish those who supported them.22 Under the Báthory princes, the court also took initiatives to promote the rights of Transylvania’s remaining Catholics. Measures that offered some rights to Catholics were, however, contested by the diet. In 1579, Jesuits were permitted to enter the principality in order to teach Catholic children, but they were strictly prohibited by the diet from undertaking any missionary activities. In 1581, the diet agreed that Catholic priests could also return to serve their communities and that Jesuits could set up residences in the capital and at two other sites.23 Prince Zsigmond Báthory’s strong support for the Catholic cause prompted a political crisis. The court invited more Jesuits into Transylvania until, in 1588, the diet refused to pass any taxes into law unless all Jesuits were expelled. The diet reminded their prince that Catholic property had been permanently expropriated in 1556 and that priests and religious orders had been thrown out of the country in 1566. The diet was willing to concede that the prince and Catholic nobles could retain one priest each, but suggested that allowing any
22 23
Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 368, 374, 534, 541. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 3, 143, 157.
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more Catholic clergy into the country would disturb the freedoms of the three “received religions”.24 Despite the terms of this agreement, Zsigmond Báthory invited more Jesuits and priests into Transylvania. In 1591, the diet conceded a little more ground, accepting that their prince could have Jesuits and other Catholic clergy at his court and other residences.25 Báthory’s support for the Catholic cause achieved further success during years of conflict between the Ottomans and Habsburgs. In 1595, Báthory agreed to an alliance with Rudolf II, which the diet ratified. The diet also agreed that there were now not three but four “received religions” in Transylvania; the Evangelical, Reformed, Unitarian, and Roman Catholic churches. Zsigmond Báthory had a Catholic bishop installed at his capital in 1597, but this proved a step too far for Protestant landowners and urban magistrates. Perhaps motivated by spiritual concerns and certainly by anxiety that a resident bishop might seek to regain control over secularised church lands, the diet expelled him in 1601. The Jesuits, who continued to be viewed with particular suspicion, were expelled in 1607 and again in 1610.26 Transylvania endured chronic political instability and conflict during the late 1590s and early 1600s, until István Bocskai gained broad support for his 1604 rebellion against Habsburg and Catholic claims to power in the region. In ever sharper contrast to the political and religious culture of Habsburg Hungary, Bocskai and successive Reformed princes represented Transylvania as a haven in which the traditional rights of nobles and the estates were respected. These rights included religious liberties, and the four “received religions” continued to enjoy legal protection throughout the 17th century. Each prince promised upon election to protect the “received religions” of the estates. The rights of the four churches were restated in the 1653 codification of the principality’s customary laws. However, some of the “received religions” enjoyed greater liberties than others. For example, state law recognised the authority of superintendents to lead the Evangelical, Reformed, and Unitarian churches but only allowed for an appointed vicarius to oversee the Catholic church in the principality. The prohibition against any doctrinal innovation continued to be confirmed 24
Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 3, 238–40. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 3, 384–5. 26 Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 3, 472; A. Jakab, “Az erdélyi római katolikus püspöki szék betöltésének vitája a xvii. században,” Erdélyi Múzeum 49 (1944): 5–20. 25
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which affected the Unitarian church in particular, as we shall see. Finally, the Orthodox Church remained reliant on privileges granted by princes and was never offered the status of a “received religion”. Its limited legal rights enabled Reformed clergy, with the support of the court, to try to introduce reforms into the practice of Orthodoxy. However, these Reformed initiatives made very little impact on Orthodox communities in the principality.27 The Reformed church acquired a dominant position in the principality during the early-17th century, thanks in particular to the support and patronage of Transylvania’s princes. Reformed princes intervened in favour of their co-religionists in disputes over access to church buildings and promoted the establishment of a Reformed college and the development of new schools. They backed some student ministers to travel to attend foreign Reformed universities. They were advised by their court chaplains as well as other leading Reformed clergy and supported the publication of Reformed texts at the capital’s printingpress. In addition, Reformed princes joined co-religionists and others in anti-Habsburg alliances during the Thirty Years’ War. This era of Reformed dominance certainly altered the character of Transylvanian political and religious life. While princes were committed to support the Reformed church, Transylvania nevertheless remained a multiconfessional state. Princes and the diet continued to support the accommodation of religious diversity in the principality in order to advance political and social stability.28 Turning to examine how local religious life was organized, there is a limited range of evidence to analyse how individuals and communities initially responded to a multiconfessional environment. However, we can at least infer a good deal about the difficulties of managing religious diversity across the country from measures introduced by the diet. While the diet’s decisions were intended to promote domestic political stability, there was also concern about the potentially dangerous
27 “Approbatae Constitutione (1653)” in Sándor Kolozsvári, Kelemen Óvári, Dezső Márkus (eds.), Magyar Törvénytár. 1500–1848 évi erdélyi törvények (Budapest: 1900), section 1/1, articles 2–3; Kálmán Benda, “Habsburg Absolutism and the Resistance of the Hungarian Estates of the 16th and 17th Centuries” in Robert J.W. Evans and Trevor Thomas (eds.), Crown, Church and Estates. Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: 1991), 123–8. 28 Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600–1660. International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford: 2000). Jenő Zoványi, A magyarországi protestántizmus 1565-től (Budapest: 1977).
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consequences caused by religious divisions. Although we now know that there were no outbreaks of violence among the different confessional communities, this was far from obvious at the time. A frequent refrain in the diet’s pronouncements on religious affairs was that all clergy must avoid using inflammatory language when talking about their confessional rivals. In 1557, the diet insisted that clergy must avoid insulting each other. In 1564, the diet warned that Reformed ministers who gained control of churches at the expense of Lutherans must not publicly ridicule their ousted rivals. In 1595, the diet insisted that Catholic clergy who moved into parishes must avoid provoking disputes with, or giving offence to, other ministers.29 It was not only the language and behaviour of clergy which were identified as potential threats to social peace. In 1563 and 1564, the diet received news of church services being disrupted by members of rival confessions and of interruptions during the celebration of the sacraments. The diet threatened severe punishment for anyone who disturbed church services or threatened public order in their communities.30 The diet also paid a good deal of attention to the difficult matter of access to sites of worship. In the countryside it seems clear that the confessional loyalties of landowners often decided the practice of religion in local communities. In many villages and also in the Saxon towns a uniform pattern of religious life was established. However, many other towns and some village communities faced the need to make practical arrangements to deal with competing religious groups. The diet put forward a number of solutions to try to maintain peace. For towns and villages with only one church building, the diet suggested in 1564 that while one group used the church their neighbours could wait quietly in the churchyard for their turn to worship. Practices of church-sharing seem to have developed between Lutheran and Catholic communities particularly in some towns in southeastern and southwestern Transylvania. In one town the two communities were instructed to use the church building on alternate Sundays. These arrangements seem likely to have given rise to problems, not least when both communities wanted to celebrate key festivals on the same day.31
29 30 31
Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 78, 231–2; vol. 3, 472. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 218. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 226–7.
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During the 1560s, the context for the shared use of church buildings shifted to cope with the rival claims of Evangelical, Reformed, and Unitarian communities. Evangelicals had required rather limited changes to be made to the visual and material culture of church buildings. The insistence of both Reformed and Unitarian ministers on plain surroundings for worship raised new difficulties for sharing churches. There are later examples of the shared use of church buildings, but these mostly occurred between Reformed and Unitarian communities. With the spread of Reformed ideas, there were also some outbreaks of iconoclasm, as ordinary people claimed space for worship with their own hands. However, it was more common for material objects associated with idolatry to be removed in an orderly way by church patrons.32 Most church buildings in Transylvania came under the control of a single minister. Laws agreed during the 1560s required that whichever confession had the support of the parish should have exclusive rights to worship in the local church. However, it was not made clear in what way the collective opinion of communities would be ascertained. Church patrons and members of the social elite certainly retained a significant voice in deciding local confessional allegiances. Be that as it may, the diet consistently supported the rights of communities to determine the practice of religion in their locality. In 1564, the diet instructed each parish to decide whether they wanted to retain an Evangelical minister or to accept a Reformed minister. In 1568, the diet agreed that ministers could only preach where their understanding of the Bible was “pleasing to the community”.33 At the same time the diet was anxious to avoid any individual being compelled to convert to a different church against his will. In 1568 and 1571, the diet demanded that no one should be abused or harmed on account of his or her faith, so long as it was consistent with the confession of one of the state-recognized churches.34 This freedom of conscience for members of “received religions” did not extend to a right of public worship anywhere in the principality. State law came to strongly support the rights of local majorities to use church buildings. This was partly in order to protect the rights
32 33 34
Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600–1660, 119–22. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 231–2, 343. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 343, 374.
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of non-Catholic communities in circumstances where the local landowner converted to Catholicism. When the diet conceded that Catholic priests could return to Transylvania in 1581 this was permitted only where they had the support of the local community. The diet’s resolution added that, if there were only a small number of Catholics in any town or village, then this was an insufficient cause for a priest to be resident.35 It reacted to news of some churches falling into Catholic hands by suggesting that local people must have been forced to convert. Biconfessional commissions were organized to determine which religion actually held the support of a majority of people in such communities, and to decide who should gain possession of the church. Some concessions were later offered to minority Catholic populations in Protestant towns. For example, the diet allowed Catholic residents in one town to call for a priest to visit should they become gravely ill. In 1600, the diet also conceded that nobles could have priests appointed to communities where they lived, but it confirmed that elsewhere priests could only be introduced with the agreement of a majority of the local congregation.36 Transylvania’s princes and laws guaranteed rights of conscience and some rights of worship to a range of religious communities during the early modern period. All of the state-sanctioned churches jostled for precedence and advantage within this multiconfessional system. The changing fortunes of the churches are in part reflected by the labels applied to them in the diet’s laws. The Evangelical church had a relatively stable identity which was associated with the local Germanspeaking community and with German-speakers elsewhere. The diet described it in 1558, as a church of “Lutherans”, in 1564, as the church of “the Saxon ministers”, in 1595, as “Lutheran” again, and in 1653, as the “Lutheran or Augsburg” religion. The Catholic church lost support during the middle decades of the 16th century, and Catholics were labelled as “Papists” in 1558. In 1595, the church gained the status of a received religion and was described as the “Catholic or Roman” church. In the 1653 codification of Transylvanian law under the Reformed prince György II Rákóczi it was named the “Roman-Catholic” church. The Reformed church had been first described by state law as a “sacramentarian” sect, and then as the church “of the Hungarian ministers
35 36
Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 3, 203, 213. Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 4, 196–7, 551.
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of Kolozsvár”. In 1567, a Reformed synod held at Debrecen adopted Heinrich Bullinger’s Second Helvetic Confession, and the church was thereafter sometimes described as “of the Swiss confession”. In 1595, the diet made a different external connection when offering rights to a “Calvinistic” church. After decades of Reformed princely rule, the 1653 law offered the church the more authoritative label of the “Evangelical Reformed (or Calvinist)” church.37 Among the four “received religions” the identity of the Unitarian church remained the most contested and uncertain. This was due partly to its origins following a split among Reformed clergy during the 1560s, partly to the fact that anti-Trinitarians only enjoyed a very short period of princely patronage before 1571, and partly to the fact that the Unitarian church lacked the support of any substantial external community of co-religionists. Ministers in the Unitarian church were described in a 1576 law as those “of Ferenc Dávid’s confession”, while, in 1595, the estates offered recognition to “Arians”. Various other polemic labels were used by opponents to describe the church, including Socinians and Samosatenians. In 1653, state law settled on the label of “Unitarian or Antitrinitarian” church.38 The remainder of this chapter will highlight some of the ways in which a multiconfessional context affected the development of this Unitarian church. It will focus on polemic battles around the emergence of the anti-Trinitarian movement and consider how state recognition affected the development of anti-Trinitarian ideas and the Unitarian church.39 The Unitarian church emerged very quickly amid stormy theological debates during the 1560s. Discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity began during the late 1550s when Ferenc Dávid, then superintendent of the Evangelical church, published a denunciation of anti-Trinitarian ideas advanced by Francesco Stancaro.40 Other Trinitarian Protestants also devoted attention to attacking anti-Trinitarian views, and Péter
37 “Approbatae Constitutiones” (1653), article 1/1/2; Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 2, 93, 226–7; vol. 3, 472. 38 “Approbatae Constitutiones” (1653), article 1/1/2; Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 3, 108, 472. 39 Mihály Balázs, Az erdélyi antitrinitarizmus az 1560–as évek végén (Budapest: 1988); Earl Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism in Transylvania, England and America (Cambridge, MA: 1952). 40 Ferenc Dávid, Apologia adversus maledicentiam et calumnias Francisci Stancari, iussu et voluntate omnium docentium coelestem doctrinam incorrupte in ecclesiis Transylvanicis conscripta (Kolozsvár: 1558).
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Méliusz Juhász published a disputation against Arianism in 1562.41 Hungarian-speaking Reformed clergy began to divide into distinct camps over their understanding of the Trinity during the mid-1560s. Both the Trinitarian and anti-Trinitarian parties were profoundly affected by this split. Trinitarian ministers gathered at synods to articulate their understanding of Christ’s nature and their conception of God. They stressed the validity of the Apostles’ Creed as a Bible-based confession of the early Church and defended their belief in “the true and holy Trinity” on the grounds of their understanding of Scripture. A Reformed synod concluded that it was unwise to speculate about “the great mystery of God” beyond what was made clear in the Bible and that “it is enough for us to know that God was in Christ and that God appeared in the flesh as the Scriptures say”. Trinitarian Reformed ministers also rejected any suggestion that they agreed with Catholics on this issue. The “articles of Christian concord”, agreed by Reformed ministers in May 1566, stressed that their church relied only on what the Bible taught, and had been cleansed of any influence from “the Pope, the true Antichrist and his whole disgusting empire”. This included a rejection of the Roman church’s “idolatry of a monstrous god of four persons” and its “corrupted knowledge of the true and always blessed Trinity”.42 Anti-Trinitarian ideas were advanced in a number of texts published during the final years of János Zsigmond Szapolyai’s rule as prince. These texts included an account of a 1568 debate held at court about the Trinity and the nature of Christ composed by Ferenc Dávid, who by then had emerged as the leading spokesman for the anti-Trinitarian cause.43 Another text published in 1568 set out anti-Trinitarian ideas in more depth. It included a series of images which portrayed the “dreadful characterizations of God” supported by Trinitarians. These illustrations were intended to depict all sorts of false ideas which the anti-Christian power of Rome had long tried to enforce on the faithful. The images included a three-headed god, a two-headed figure of
41 Péter Méliusz Juhász, Az Aran Tamas hamis es eretnec tevelgesinec es egyeb soc tevelgéseknec (Debrecen: 1562). 42 For the decisions of Reformed synods during the 16th century see Áron Kiss (ed.), A xvi. században tartott magyar református zsinatok végzései (Budapest: 1882), 455–8. 43 Ferenc Dávid, Brevis enarratio disputationis Albanae de Deo trino et Christo duplici coram Serenissimo Principe, et tota Ecclesia decem diebus habita (Gyulafehérvár: 1568).
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Christ, three separate gods, and Christ descending from heaven not born of Mary.44 A polemic battle developed in print between Ferenc Dávid and Péter Méliusz Juhász as the main spokesmen for their rival parties. In another 1568 tract Dávid juxtaposed the doctrine “of ministers of the crucified Christ” against his portrayal of the views advanced by Méliusz about the Trinity. Dávid explained that “the ministers of Christ” believed that “Jesus Christ is the only-begotten Son of God, conceived by the Holy Spirit, and born of Mary”. He suggested that Méliusz believed that “Christ was not the only-begotten son of God the Father, but the son of the first person of God”.45 In 1568, the diet permitted preachers to explain the Gospel “according to their understanding of it”. Ferenc Dávid became the first superintendent of the new Unitarian church and in 1569 published a collection of his sermons “to build up God’s people”. The Unitarian church controlled some schools in urban centers, and ministers used printed catechisms to teach their congregations. Unitarian communities also flourished in some rural communities particularly in eastern and southeastern counties.46 Trinitarian and anti-Trinitarian writers continued to battle over which group could claim the correct understanding of the nature of God. In a 1571 tract Dávid reflected on the intensity of opposition which he had faced from his Trinitarian opponents. He suggested that Péter Méliusz Juhász and his Reformed colleagues were “adventurous companions of the Pope”, since they supported false doctrine and participated in idolatrous forms of worship. He explained that all Trinitarians had always shown hostility towards “servants of the crucified Jesus Christ”, and concluded that the anger directed towards him provided clear evidence that “I am on the way of truth”.47 During the 1570s, the “way of truth” being pursued by Dávid and some of his colleagues caused them to reflect further on what the Bible taught about the person of Christ. They began to express doubts
44 De falsa et vera unius Dei patris, filii et spiritus sancti cognitione libr duo. Authoribus ministris ecclesiarum consentientium in Sarmatia et Transylvania (Gyulafehérvár: 1568), e3r–f3r. 45 Ferenc Dávid, Demonstratio falsitatis doctrinae Petri Melii (Gyulafehérvár: 1568), biir. 46 Ferenc Dávid, Első resze az Szent Irasnac külen külen reszeyböl vöt predicaciocnac az atya Istenröl (Gyulafehérvár: 1569). 47 Ferenc Dávid, Az egy ö magatol valo felséges Istenröl es az ö igaz Fiarol, a nazareti Iesusrol, az igaz Messiasrol (Kolozsvár: 1571), a3r–b3r.
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about whether Christ ought to be an object of adoration by the faithful. The changing content of Dávid’s sermons and internal discussion among Unitarian ministers about further reforms led to heightened anxiety among Trinitarians in the diet. The diet denounced doctrinal innovation, and expressed particular concerned about “distinct and new things” being taught by some Unitarian ministers. The diet then imposed some restrictions on the rights of the Unitarian church to try to prevent any further changes to the confessional landscape in Transylvania. In 1576, Unitarians were only permitted to hold their synods in two nominated towns. In 1577, the diet limited the rights of senior clergy to visit Unitarian parishes. Meanwhile the diet permitted the Reformed superintendent to instruct clergy in both Reformed and Unitarian parishes so long as he did not use force.48 The issue of “non-adorantism” of Christ reached a crisis-point in 1579. At the diet Demeter Hunyadi led a group of Unitarian clergy who supported the adoration of Christ in worship. Ferenc Dávid defended his views about Christ’s nature and was subsequently arrested on charges of doctrinal innovation under the 1572 law. By the time he died in prison later that year a Unitarian synod had already appointed Demeter Hunyadi as their new superintendent. All ministers who took part at this synod were obliged to confirm that they agreed with the adoration of Christ as a legitimate and appropriate form of the worship of God.49 During the latter decades of the 16th century, Unitarian superintendents and synods prohibited any further public debate about the nature of Christ. The Unitarian church’s legal status was dependent upon acceptance of the limits imposed by the law against doctrinal innovation. However, varieties of “non-adorantist” ideas persisted among some Unitarian clergy and laity. Radical ideas about Christ re-surfaced during the early decades of the 17th century among a group known as Sabbatarians. Sabbatarians recognized the divine inspiration of the Old Testament and lived by its laws as they awaited the arrival of Christ the Messiah. We are reliant on evidence from opponents for much of our understanding about the religious practices adopted by Sabbatarian communities. They seem to have abandoned worship on Sundays
48
Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, vol. 3, 108, 122–3, 125, 142. Róbert Dán and Antal Pirnát (eds), Antitrinitarianism in the Second Half of the 16th Century (Budapest: 1982); Mihály Balázs and Gizella Keserű (eds.), György Enyedi and Central European Unitarianism in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Budapest: 2000). 49
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and probably to have abandoned the celebration of any sacraments.50 Sabbatarian groups could be prosecuted by state authorities under the 1572 law against doctrinal innovation. In 1610, some Sabbatarians were arrested, and, in 1618, the Reformed prince Gábor Bethlen led a search for any Sabbatarian communities. This followed the prince’s attendance at a theological debate where he was apparently shocked on hearing what anti-Trinitarians believed. Reformed minister István Melotai Nyilas dedicated a 1622 text to Bethlen, reminding the prince of his reaction to learning about anti-Trinitarianism. Melotai called for action against Sabbatarian groups and argued against any legal protection for “Arians” and “Samosatenians”. He further suggested that anti-Trinitarianism had been offered the status of a “received religion” during a period of political instability and that it was now time to join the rest of Christian Europe in condemning Unitarians as atheists.51 A Reformed chorus of complaint about Sabbatarianism grew during the 1630s. The Reformed synod requested that prince György I Rákóczi set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the form of religion adopted by some Szekler communities where landowners were believed to be protecting Sabbatarians. It hoped for firm action by the authorities against a sect that it suggested the prince “was not bound to tolerate”. In 1638, the diet launched an inquiry into the possible spread of Sabbatarianism in the principality. Since Sabbatarians outwardly declared themselves to be Unitarians, there were also profound implications from these investigations for the Unitarian church. In 1638, the diet demanded that the Unitarian superintendent provide evidence to demonstrate that the doctrine and practices of his church had not been infected by the novel opinions of radical groups. It asked the church leadership to compose a confession of faith that explicitly acknowledged that Christ as God was to be worshipped and adored. The diet also demanded that the Unitarian church draw up a new catechism under the supervision of the Reformed superintendent. This catechism supported the adoration of Christ and confirmed that Unitarians should be baptised and receive Communion.52
50 S. Kohn, A szombatosok történetük, dogmatikájuk és irodalmok (Budapest: 1890). 51 István Melotai Nyilas, Speculum Trinitatis (Debrecen: 1622), 6. 52 Sándor Szilágyi and B. Orbán, “Az unitáriusok 1638-diki üldöztetéseinek s a deési complanatiónak történetéhez,” Keresztény Magvető 9 (1874): 150–62.
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Individuals who would not accept this form of adorantist and sacramental anti-Trinitarianism were arrested as religious innovators. Some landowners caught up in this investigation had their property confiscated, and others were imprisoned. One execution on grounds of heresy was carried out against the son of a former Unitarian superintendent. The authorities offered those they imprisoned the chance for freedom only on condition of accepting Reformed articles of faith. Many Sabbatarians accepted this offer, which directly benefited the interests of the Reformed church in some areas. Parishes, which had previously been controlled by the Unitarian church, were transformed into majority Reformed communities after these forced conversions. The Reformed church gained control over church buildings in these communities under the law which protected the rights of public worship for local confessional majorities. There is some evidence of the continued secret practice of Sabbatarianism at least into the 1640s. Reformed clergy certainly persisted with their attacks against Sabbatarianism. In 1645, the Reformed superintendent István Geleji Katona published a defence of the doctrine of the Trinity in which he suggested that all forms of anti-Trinitarianism pointed towards the “judaising atheism” of the “dangerous sect” of Sabbatarians. Geleji also argued that use of the name Unitarian provided evidence that all anti-Trinitarians did not worship Christ as God. Geleji therefore concluded that the Unitarian church had forfeited any right to state recognition.53 The Unitarian church retained its rights as a “received religion”, but these rights did not prevent the church from being subjected to external interference. Princes worked in collaboration with the Reformed church to undermine Unitarian communities. For example, at the beginning of the 17th century, the Unitarian-dominated town of Cluj had only a small minority Reformed congregation. Princely backing enabled the Reformed church to gain possession of a larger church and to open a school. By the 1640s the Reformed community had broken Unitarian control of the town council.54 Another centre of Unitarian strength lay in the towns and villages of southeastern
53 István Geleji Katona, Titkok Titka (Gyulafehérvár: 1645). See the introduction for Geleji’s attack on the status of the Unitarian church. 54 Carmen Florea, “Shaping Transylvanian Anti-Trinitarian Identity in an Urban Context” in Crăciun et al., Confessional Identity in East-Central Europe (2002), 64–80.
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Transylvania. Unitarian and Reformed congregations in this remote region were joined in an administrative union at the beginning of the 17th century. Some churches were held by the Reformed church in theory but in practice they were served by Unitarian ministers. The Reformed clergy hierarchy succeeded in using this situation to their advantage. After conducting a visitation of local parishes in 1622, the Reformed superintendent expelled around 60 Unitarian clergy from notionally-Reformed parishes. Thereafter, Unitarian ministers were prohibited from moving to any parishes which were supposed to be Reformed, although Reformed ministers continued to have the right to preach in Unitarian churches across the region. At Cristuru Secuiesc (Székelykeresztúr) the local Reformed community lost control of the church building when Unitarians gained majority support in the town. In such situations the new majority community was supposed to build a place of worship for the displaced minority to use. In 1631, the Reformed synod complained to the prince that Unitarians had failed to provide anywhere for their community to worship. The prince suggested that the two communities might share the building, but such solutions no longer appealed to a confident Reformed church. By the mid-1640s the Reformed community at Cristuru Secuiesc had regained control of the church building thanks to the efforts of local Reformed landowners.55 This case-study of the Transylvania principality suggests that multiconfessionalism describes a set of pragmatic rather than ideological responses to the changing character of European states and societies after the Reformation. Multiconfessional communities were not built upon, and did not exhibit, religious tolerance according to any modern definition of the concept.56 The stability of multiconfessional societies did not rely on any mutual respect between adherents of different faiths. Rather, detailed regulations about the rights that were being extended to religious communities were thought necessary precisely in order to prevent social disturbances and outbreaks of violence. Most
55 István Juhász, A székelyföldi református egyházmegyék (Kolozsvár: 1947), 49; J. Koncz, “Az erdélyi ev. ref. egyház vallássárelmei 1631-ben, beterjesztve I. Rákóczi György fejedelemhez orvoslás végett,” Erdélyi Protestáns Közlöny (1882): 380–1, 422–3. 56 Recent studies on tolerance include: Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith. Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2007); John Laursen and Cary Nederman (eds.), Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: 1998); Alex Walsham, Charitable Hatred. Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: 2006).
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people continued to hope that regulations that permitted some degree of religious diversity would only need to be temporary measures until unity was restored. However, the consistent application of laws that sanctioned religious diversity could lead over time to peaceful coexistence between different confessional communities. Meanwhile sharp religious polemic continued to be a feature of relations between clergy in multiconfessional states. Indeed, the venomous nature of clerical attacks on the beliefs of their rivals was perhaps only intensified by a sense of frustration about a lack of capacity for firm action against heresy. Multiconfessional states also retained a strong culture in favour of a dominant church. During the early-17th century, the Reformed community in Transylvania, with support from the court, was able to restrict the liberty of Unitarian consciences and deny rights of public worship to Unitarian congregations. However, the hard-fought legal settlements between the four “received religions” were maintained in the 17th century. Transylvania’s difficult international position between the Habsburg monarchy and Ottoman empire, the balance of internal politics between the court and estates, and the patchwork of religious loyalties across the principality all ensured that confessional pluralism continued to be seen as the best means to advance Transylvania’s stability and social peace.
FIVE CONFESSIONS IN ONE CITY: MULTICONFESSIONALISM IN EARLY MODERN WILNO David Frick To say that early modern Wilno (Vilnius) was a multiconfessional city risks understating the variety of competing and overlapping demands that religions, cultures, languages, and ties of ethnicity made upon individual Vilnans; it also obscures the means by which co-existence in the city was made feasible. Here I wish to locate Wilno on the map of confessional Europe: to assess the range of its multiconfessionalism; to reveal some of the manners and mechanisms its citizens developed for encouraging, facilitating, and sometimes imposing toleration among its inhabitants; to attempt a measuring of levels of confessional zeal; and to place the city on a spectrum of the solutions found in contemporary European communities—from exclusion at one extreme to types of inclusion at the other—for addressing the problems that arose when members of more than one confession attempted to live in one city.1 The Setting Wilno—by the early 14th century the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—had been a mixed city even before the formal Christianization of that large state in 1386 under the sponsorship of the Polish Roman Catholic Church. At that point, it was inhabited by pagan Lithuanians, Orthodox Ruthenians2 (who had moved to the city after what had once been Kievan Rus’ began to come under Lithuanian rule in the 13th and 14th centuries, following the Mongol invasion and sacking of Kiev in 1240), and Catholic Germans (who had been 1 This essay draws on, and seeks to summarize, some of the arguments and conclusions of a book-in-progress devoted to relations between people of various confessions, cultures, and religions in 17th-century Wilno. 2 The adjective ruthenus in Latin, ruski in Polish and Ruthenian, and related ethnonyms, referred to Orthodox (later Orthodox and Uniate) Christians of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, ancestors of Ukrainians and Belarusians. It was distinct from “Muscovite/Russian” in early modern usage.
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invited as merchants by the pagan grand dukes). Some have located the origins of Wilno’s traditions of practical toleration in these patterns established in the pre-conversion period.3 The late-14th century also marked the arrival in the area of Wilno of numbers of Tatars and Karaim. The Tatars had no legal right to live within the walls of Wilno; they settled, however, with a wooden mosque and a school, in the adjacent suburb of Łukiszki (Lukiškės) and were thus a part of the daily life of the city.4 Karaim (members of 3 In the view of Marceli Kosman (Protestanci i kontrreformacja. Z dziejów tolerancji w Rzeczypospolitej XVI–XVIII wieku [Wrocław: 1978], 44), “the Grand Duchy was then [in 1385, the year of the Union of Krewo that led to Jagiełło’s conversion, his marriage with Queen Jadwiga of Poland, and the federation between the two states] a multiethnic and multiconfessional state, in which the question of tolerance had been shaped favorably for more than a century.” See also Marceli Kosman, “Konflikty wyznaniowe w Wilnie. (Schyłek XVI–XVII w.),” Kwartalnik Historyczny 79 (1972): 3–23; idem, Reformacja i kontrreformacja w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim w świetle propagandy wyznaniowej (Wrocław: 1973). Among handbooks treating early Lithuanian history, see Jerzy Ochmański, Historia Litwy (Wrocław: 1990); Zigmantas Kiaupa, Jūratė Kiaupienė, and Albinas Kuncevičius, Lietuvos istorija iki 1795 metų (Vilnius: 1995) and its English version in idem, The History of Lithuania before 1795 (Vilnius: 2000); Edvardas Gudavičius, Lietuvos istorija nuo seniausių laikų iki 1569 metų (Vilnius: 1999). For histories of Wilno in the late medieval and early modern periods, see Michał Baliński, Historia miasta Wilna, 2 vols. (Vilnius: 1837); Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Wilno od początków jego do roku 1750, 4 vols. (Vilnius: 1840–1842); Ju. Kračkovskij’s introduction to vol. 20 of Akty, izdavaemye Vilenskoju arxeografičeskoju komissieju, 39 vols. (Vilnius: 1865–1915) [hereafter AVAK]; V.G. Vasil’evskij, “Očerk istorii goroda Vil’ny,” in P.N. Batjuškov (ed.), Pamjatniki russkoj stariny v zapadnych gubernijach imperii, vols. 5–6 (St. Petersburg: 1872–1874); Maria Łowmiańska, Wilno przed najazdem moskiewskim 1655 roku (Bibljoteczka wileńska) 3 (Vilnius: 1929), now re-edited in idem, “Wilno przed najazdem moskiewskim 1655 roku” in Rafał Witkowski (ed.), Dwa Doktoraty z Uniwersytetu Stefana Batorego w Wilnie (Poznań: 2005), 149–331; Władysław Kowalenko, “Geneza udziału stołecznego miasta Wilna w sejmach Rzeczypospolitej,” Ateneum Wileńskie 2 (1925–1926): 327–73, 3 (1927): 79–137; and J. Jurginis, V. Merkys, and A. Tautavičius, Vilniaus miesto istorija nuo seniausių laikų iki Spalio revoliucijos (Vilnius: 1968). Of crucial importance for the history of the Wilno magistracy and the local elite in the 17th century are the recent works of Aivas Ragauskas, among which his “collective biography of the ruling elite” occupies the most prominent position: Aivas Ragauskas, Vilniaus miesto valdantysis elitas XVII a. antrojoje pusėje (1662–1702 m.) (Vilnius: 2002). 4 On Lithuanian Tatars in the early modern period, see Piotr Borawski, “O sytuacji wyznaniowej ludności tatarskiej w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim i w Polsce (XVI– XVIII w.),” Euhemer. Przegląd religioznawczy 24, no. 118 (1980): 43–54; idem, “Tolerancja religijna wobec ludności tatarskiej w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim (XVI–XVIII wiek),” Przegląd humanistyczny 25, no. 3 (1981): 51–66; idem, “Sytuacja prawna ludności tatarskiej w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim (XVI–XVIII w.),” Acta BalticoSlavica 15 (1983): 55–76; idem, “Asymilacja kulturowa Tatarów w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim,” Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce 36 (1992): 163–92; idem and Witold Stankiewicz, “Chrystianizacja Tatarów w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim,” Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce 34 (1989): 87–114; A. Muchliński (ed.), “Zdanie sprawy o Tatarach
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a Scripture-based medieval Jewish sect that had rejected rabbinical traditions and the Talmud) found a home in Troki (Trakai), a day’s walk away, and they would play a certain role in the life of Wilno’s Jewish community; they thus belong to the margins of the story in early modern Wilno.5 Jews were slower to gain legal footing in Wilno than in other cities of Lithuania. In 1551 the Sejm (parliament) exempted the Wilno houses of the grand duke’s council from the jurisdiction of the magistracy, thus preparing the way for Jews to rent those noble houses within the city walls, and eventually to buy them. The first synagogue came into being in the center of the city in 1573, and in 1593, in the wake of anti-Jewish riots, King Zygmunt III Waza gave the Jews of Wilno their foundational privilege to live in certain streets and to engage in certain occupations “especially since we already found [the Jews living in Wilno] on Our happy arrival here to these domains, the Polish Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.”6
litewskich przez jednego z tych Tatarów złożone Sułtanowi Sulejmanowi w r. 1558,” Teka wileńska 4 (1858): 241–72, 5 (1858): 121–79, and 6 (1858): 139–83; Jacek Sobczak, Położenie prawne ludności tatarskiej w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk, Wydział Historii i Nauk Społecznych, Prace Komisji Historycznej) vol. 38 (Poznań: 1984); Simon Szyszman, “Osadnictwo karaimskie i tatarskie na ziemiach Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego,” Myśl karaimska 10 (1933): 29–36; Leon Kryczyński, “Historia meczetu w Wilnie. (Próba monografii.),” Przegląd islamski 6 (1937): 7–33; Andrzej B. Zakrzewski, “Osadnictwo tatarskie w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim—aspekty wyznaniowe,” Acta Baltico-Slavica 20 (1989): 137–53; idem, “O asymilacji Tatarów w Rzeczypospolitej w XVI–XVIII w,” in Maria Bogucka (ed.), Tryumfy i porażki. Studia z dziejów kultury polskiej XVI–XVIII w. (Warsaw: 1989), 75–96; idem, “Niektóre aspekty położenia kulturalnego Tatarów Litewskich w XVI–XVIII w.” in Wilno—Wileńszczyzna jako krajobraz i środowisko wielu kultur, vol. 2 (Białystok: 1992), 107–28; Jan Tyszkiewicz, Tatarzy na Litwie i w Polsce. Studia z dziejów XIII–XVIII w. (Warsaw: 1989). 5 On Lithuanian Karaim, see Szyszman “Osadnictwo”; idem, Le Karïsme. Ses doctrines et son histoire (Lausanne: 1980); A. Geiger, Isaak Troki. Ein Apologet des Iudenthums am Ende des sechszehnten Jahrhunderts (Wrocław: 1853); Jacob Mann, Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature, vol. 2, Karaitica (Philadelphia: 1935); and, most recently, Stefan Gąsiorowski, Karaimi w Koronie i na Litwie w XV– XVIII wieku (Cracow: 2008). 6 Cited from the Metryka Litewska 78, (Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Arxiv Drevnix Aktov [Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Moscow] 389.78), f. 250v. On the Jews of Wilno, see S.A. Beršadskij, “Istorija vilenskoj evrejskoj obščiny. 1593–1649 g. Na osnovaniju neizdavannych istočnikov,” Vosxod 6, no. 10 (1886): 125–38, 6, no. 11 (1886): 145–54, 7 no. 3 (1887): 81–98, 7 no. 4 (1887): 65–78, 7 no. 5 (1887): 16–32, 7 no. 6 (1887): 58–73, 7 no. 8 (1887): 97–110; Israel Klausner, Vilnah, Yerushalayim de-Lita: dorot rishonim 1495–1881 (Tel Aviv: 1988); Israel Cohen, Vilna (Philadephia: 1992, a facsimile reprint of the edition of 1943). For the earlier period, Klausner and Cohen drew on Beršadskij, whose study was based on primary sources, some apparently no longer extant.
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After a few false starts, the Reformation became a long-term part of the life of Wilno from the second half of the 16th century. Permanent fixtures in the confessional landscape were the Lutherans and the Calvinists. The Lutheran church, with spire and bells, school and hospital, established ca. 1555 on German Street, where it was to remain, was largely non-gentry, composed of members of the city ruling elite (until a ban in 1666), plus professionals, merchants, and artisans, from the more exalted (doctors, lawyers, and goldsmiths) to the dirtier trades (tanners and furriers). Its two congregations, a Germanspeaking majority and a Polish-speaking minority, shared the same building and, sometimes, the same bilingual ministers. The Calvinists worshipped at first in private residences, beginning in the 1560s, but by 1577 they had begun to build their church complex across the street from the Bernardines’ Church of St. Michael. After an anti-Calvinist tumult in 1639, a royal decree of 1640 would remove them to the site of their old cemetery just outside the walls, where they too remained.7 The Lithuanian Reformed Church was largely noble, although some burghers did appear in its midst, especially, of course, in an urban setting like Wilno. Here it had a Polish-speaking majority and a Germanspeaking minority (and it was also home to a group of Scots). In 1596, as a result of the Union of Brest, the majority of the Ruthenian Orthodox Church hierarchy agreed to enter into communion with Rome, forming what was known as the Uniate (later called Greek Catholic) Church. Much of the Ruthenian flock and lesser clergy, however, rejected the move; they thus, in their view, remained truly Orthodox and therefore heirs to all rights and privileges conferred upon the “Greeks” of the city and the Commonwealth. All the churches of Wilno that were Orthodox in 1595 were eventually turned over to the Uniates. In 1598, the Orthodox began establishing a new center in the Holy Spirit church, monastery, hospital, and brotherhood, just across the street from what would now become the leading Uniate complex at the Church of the Holy Trinity (both of them clustered, together with the Discalced Carmelites’ Church of St. Teresa, around the Sharp
7 On the events of 1639–1640, see Bogumił Zwolski, Sprawa Zboru ewangelickoreformowanego w Wilnie w latach 1639–41, (Bibljoteczka wileńska) 6 (Vilnius: 1936); Henryk Wisner, “Likwidacja zboru ewangelickiego w Wilnie (1639–1646). Z dziejów walki z inaczej wierzącymi,” Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce 37 (1993): 89–102; Urszula Augustyniak, “Jeszcze raz w sprawie tumultu wileńskiego 1639 i jego następstwach,” Odrodzenie i reformacja w Polsce 50 (2006): 169–89.
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Gate). When the Orthodox hierarchy was “illegally” reestablished in 1620, Wilno became the first scene of the debate over the status of those bishops and their flocks.8 By 1650, then, this modestly sized conurbation9 was peopled by Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Ruthenians, Jews, and Tatars (in addition to some numbers of Scots, Italians, and other immigrants); these peoples worshipped in some 23 Catholic, nine Uniate, one Orthodox, one Calvinist, and one Lutheran church, one chief synagogue, and one mosque; they spoke Polish, Ruthenian, German, Yiddish, Lithuanian, and some Tatar;10 and they prayed or wrote learned treatises also in Latin, Church Slavonic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and a little Arabic. Polish was certainly at the least the city’s lingua franca, and all the Christians were feeling (although many ignored) pressures and enticements to conform to a certain Polish and Roman Catholic norm, which was one path to social advancement. The walls of the city of Wilno stretched
8 On the Christian confessions in early modern Wilno and their interrelations, see Adam Ferdynand Adamowicz, Kościół augsburski w Wilnie. Kronika (Vilnius: 1855); Gottfried Schramm, “Protestantismus und städtische Gesellschaft in Wilna (16.–17. Jahrhundert),” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 17 (1969): 187–214; Kosman, “Konflikty wyznianiowe”; idem, Reformacja i kontrreformacja; idem, Protestanci i kontrreformacja; Ragauskas, Vilniaus miesto valdantysis elitas (on the “religious affiliation” of the members of the ruling elite, especially 153–69). Borys A. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, MA: 1998) and David A. Frick, Meletij Smotryc’kyj (Cambridge, MA: 1995) can serve as places to start a study of the Union of Brest and the polemics in Wilno. For the texts of Jesuit satires directed against the Wilno Lutherans, see Zbigniew Nowak, Kontrreformacyjna satyra obyczajowa w Polsce XVII wieku, (Gdańskie Towarzystwo Naukowe, Wydział I Nauk Społecznych i Humanistycznych, Seria Źródeł) 9 (Gdańsk: 1968). On them, see also Aivas Ragauskas, “XVII a. pirmosios pusės Vilniaus liuteronų subkultūros atspindžiai jėzuitų satyroje,” in Lokalios bendrijos tarpdalykiniu požiūriu. Straipsnių rinkinys (Vilnius: 2004), 45–53. 9 Demographic sources are few and difficult to evaluate, and estimates have differed radically—between 14,000 inhabitants ca. 1650 (Łowmiańska, Wilno [1929 edition], 77/Łowmiańska, Wilno [2005 edition], 223) and 38,000 to 40,000 (A. Tamulynas, “Vilniaus gyventojų skaičiaus XVII a. viduryje klausimu” Jaunųjų istorikų darbai 6 [1982]: 113–6). All have agreed—again, with few sources to support their claims— that the Muscovite siege and occupation of the city in 1655 cut the number in half, and that the rest of the 17th century was a period of slow and incomplete rebuilding before the next urban crisis during the Great Northern War at the beginning of the 18th century. 10 On the decline in the use of the Tatar language among Lithuanian Tatars, see Hadży Seraja Szapszal, “O zatraceniu języka ojczystego przez Tatarów w Polsce,” Rocznik Tatarski 1 (1932): 34–48; Andrzej Drozd, Arabskie teksty liturgiczne w przekładzie na język polski XVII wieku (Warsaw: 1999), 30–9.
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for 2.9 km (Cracow’s walls—3.1 km), and they enclosed an area of 0.8 km2 (Cracow—0.6 km2).11 Mechanisms and Manners of Coexistence: In the Magistracy Wilno received Magdeburg law in 1387, and members of all the Christian confessions would eventually be eligible for citizenship. In 1536, after a city council had been elected that was 100 percent Ruthenian or “Greek” (that is to say, Orthodox), the “Lachs”—a term that usually meant Poles, but here signified all Catholics, including Lithuanians and Germans—obtained from King Zygmunt I a privilege that decreed an equal division between “Greeks” and “Romans” in all future elections to the city magistracy: benchers (ławnicy, scabini), councilors, and burgomasters.12 At this point (i.e., before the Reformation and before the Union of Brest), the terms Roman and Greek exhausted the range of Christian confessions represented in city government, although each term might cover more than one ethnic group. With the increasing fragmentation of Roman and Greek Christianity in the course of the 16th century, more and more groups would compete for seats under the Roman and Greek quotas. By the beginning of the 17th century, a “Roman” Vilnan might be Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist, and a “Greek” Vilnan—Uniate or Orthodox.13 In 1666 King Jan Kazimierz Waza passed three restrictive decrees (“ad instar [after the fashion of] Cracow”) limiting the Roman seats
11 Łowmiańska, Wilno (1929 edition), 17/Łowmiańska, Wilno (2005 edition), 164–5. 12 See Kowalenko, “Geneza udziału,” 369; Schramm, “Protestantismus und städtische Gesellschaft,” 202–204; Zbiór dawnych dyplomatów i aktów miast: Wilna, Kowna, Trok, prawosławnych monasterów, cerkwi i w różnych sprawach, part 1 (Vilnius: 1843), 53; Piotr Dubiński (ed.), Zbiór praw i przywilejów miastu stołecznemu W.X.L. Wilnowi nadanych. Na żądaniu wielu miast koronnych, jako też Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego ułożony i wydany (Vilnius: 1788), 54. The career of a member of the ruling elite progressed along that road—from service in the court of the bench, to the wider council, and finally to the annual council composed of four councilors and two annual burgomasters. A very few would reach the pinnacle of urban power, the office of the wójt (from the German Vogt), which was reserved for Roman Catholics. Parity between Greeks and Romans remained in force at every level below that of the wójt. On the structure and function of the Wilno magistracy, see Ragauskas, Vilniaus miesto valdantysis elitas, 43–102. 13 This was generally the case, although Ragauskas (ibid., 166–69) notes a few isolated instances where Lutherans and Calvinists occupied Greek seats in the magistracy.
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in the magistracy to Roman Catholics and the Greek seats to Uniates. The reference to Cracow was, in fact, not entirely apt. In contrast to the old capital of the Polish Crown, where the power in city government was entirely limited to Roman Catholics by the end of the 16th century, the Wilno magistracy would remain divided between Romans and Greeks. In spite of pressure to conform to a Polonized and Catholic norm, the elite “Greeks” (even if they were Uniates) were still an important presence; and these Uniates often looked to Greek Orthodox circles, rather than Roman Catholic, in forming family and more extended human networks. At Work The types of parity arrangements worked out for the magistracy were reflected in a wide range of secular consortia throughout the city. Here the royal intervention of 1666, limiting seats held by Romans and Greeks to those in communion with Rome, had no direct bearing. One paradoxical result of the adherence to Roman-Greek parity in the magistracy was that, even in its more restrictive post-1666 form, it could continue to serve as a model for much broader multiconfessionalism in other city corporations. These arrangements began at the top of the social scale, just below the ruling elite, with the Communitas mercatoria, a representative body of Wilno’s merchants who practiced wholesale trade on an international scale and from which individuals and families often launched careers in the magistracy. Established in 1602, its annually elected sexagintavirate (“60-man ruling body”) was divided equally into Greek and Roman “sides.”14 No further specification of confession or ethnicity within those broad categories was offered, but conditions in the city’s guilds, about which we know considerably more, suggest that members of all five recognized confessions could compete for seats under Greek and Roman quotas throughout the period.
14 On the Communitas mercatoria, see Maria Łowmiańska, “Udział communitatis mercatoriae w samorządzie wileńskim,” Lituano-Slavica Posnaniensia 9 (2003): 75–108 and Kowalenko, “Geneza udziału.” Kowalenko provided a transcript of the names constituting the first sexagintavirate from 1602; it is now the sole extant list, the old record books having been lost in World War II.
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A few echoes of the imposition of confessional limits upon Greek and Roman seats in the magistracy were heard in guild statutes and other acta beginning soon after 1666, on occasion couched explicitly as an imitation of the royal decree from that year. The most sweeping attempt at a clergy-led, top-down imposition of confessional order upon the workplace came in a decree promulgated by King Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki sometime before 10 November 1673. At the request of the Uniate Metropolitan of Rus’, Gabriel Kolenda, the king called for a stiff fine—1,000 zł15—to be imposed upon any guild in Wilno that dared elect to its highest office, that of “annual elder,” a dissident or a disuniate. That document invoked the model of the magistracy: “just as by now ( już) in the Roman and Ruthenian bench no disuniate or dissident may take office, so let no disuniate be elected to the eldership in the guilds of the city of Wilno.”16 Unlike in the magistracy, however, this appears to have been wishful thinking on the part of the confessionalizers and was not implemented. Parity arrangements in the guilds had grown up following the reform of the magistracy in 1536. At first they imitated the practice of that body quite closely, and later, as the confessional spectrum became more complicated, they would continue to use the magistracy’s division of offices between Greeks and Romans as a general model. For instance, the maltsters and the cobblers, who had their separate articles approved by King Zygmunt II August on 9 December 1552, called for the annual election of four or six elders in the first case, six in the second, in each guild with equal numbers “ex Romana fide” [“from the Roman faith”] and “ex Graeco ritu” [from the Greek rite”].17 This was just before the Reformation was to gain footing in the city and well before the Union of Brest (1596), thus the terms were likely unambiguous in identifying the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox confessions, although certainly more than one ethnicity might have been included under the heading “Roman.”
15 Local documents used both Polish currency (1 złoty [zł] = 30 groszy [gr]) and Lithuanian (1 Lithuanian kopa [k; “schock” or “unit of 60”] = 60 Lithuanian gr). By royal decree of 1572, 2 Lithuanian gr = 2.5 Polish gr. In 1673 the municipal trumpeter of Lwów made 4 zł a week or 208 zł per year. See Stanisław Hoszowski, Ceny we Lwowie w XVI i XVII wieku, Badania z dziejów społecznych i gospodarczych, fasc. 4 (Lwów: 1928), 223. 16 Henryk Łowmiański and Maria Łowmiańska, Akta cechów wileńskich, vol. 1 (Vilnius: 1939) [hereafter ACW], 382; AVAK 8, 144. 17 ACW, 42, 45.
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Twenty-seven years later, in articles approved by King Stefan Batory on 1 July 1579, the cobblers gave greater articulation to their arrangements. They were to elect six annual elders, two “from the Catholics” (ex catholicis), two “of the Greek or Ruthenian rite” (ritus Graeci seu Ruthenici), and two “from the German faith” (ex Germanicae fidei).18 By now, the term German in guild statutes quite clearly signified adherents of the Lutheran confession; Catholic Germans—they remained a presence in Wilno and were still seen as German—would have competed for power under the Polish or Lithuanian rubric. Other guilds followed suit, with greater and lesser precision as to ethnicity and confession. Just two examples from the many: the locksmiths (before 1663) called for the election of three annual elders, two “from Lithuania,” and the third a “German.”19 The opposition was clearly between “locals” and “foreigners,” but it was also between Roman Catholics (including Poles and Polonized people) and Lutherans, many of whom among the latter would have been in Wilno for a generation or more and had citizenship. And on 9 July 1689, the cobblers called for three annual elders, one each among the Romans, Ruthenians, and Germans. The articles later referred to these groupings alternately (and interchangeably in some instances) as “religions” (religie) or “faiths” (wiary), but also as “nations” (narody).20 There is some evidence of tension within the guilds arising along ethno-confessional fault lines.21 But far more frequently the complaints that reached the magistracy targeted guild members who refused to be subject to discipline and engaged in acts of disrespect and, sometimes, violence that had no apparent connection with confession. (That the magistracy heard these cases means that they—and no doubt many more—had already been raised in closed guild sessions, inaccessible to us now.) In 1689 the annual elders of the haberdashers’ guild, “Tomasz Krumbeich” and “Henricus von Bengin” brought a case before the magistracy against “famatus Michael Angel” for the greatest of all acts
18
ACW, 80. ACW, 277. 20 ACW, 374, 452–3. 21 For example, in 1666, a Roman Catholic goldsmith named Jan Rohaczewicz brought a complaint against Lutheran elder Mateusz Grejter for “favoring the dissidents” (the guild was heavily Lutheran) by blocking access to power in the guild to anyone but the Lutherans. See ACW, 343–4. 19
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of license: practicing the trade without belonging to the guild.22 The offering rolls for the Lutheran church tell us that one of the plaintiffs, Tobias Krumbein (this was the more “correct” form of his name, judging by the frequency of this form in other, Polish-language documents), as well as the accused, Michel Engel, were both of the Augsburg Confession; von Bengin’s name is missing in the Lutheran rolls.23 Thus we see here that the guild, silently honoring the practice of giving power to multiple confessions in a parity arrangement (well after the attempted ban in 1673!), had sent one Lutheran and (in all likelihood) one Roman Catholic elder (even if apparently also German) to the magistracy to complain about the behavior of a Lutheran, but without any reference whatsoever to the confession of the interested parties, because that was immaterial. The central problem that the mixed guilds—and they were almost all mixed in Wilno in the 17th century—had to address was the fact that they were structured in part like religious brotherhoods, to the extent that they undertook a number of acts of Church service, typically through support of a guild altar and participation in public processions, not only of the secular sort (reception of dignitaries upon their arrival in town), but also of the religious.24 The altar in question was almost always Roman Catholic, as was the chief public religious procession, the annual Corpus Christi celebration introduced toward the end of the 16th century by the local Jesuits. This latter event divided Vilnans in at least two ways: Catholics from Protestants over doctrine on the divine presence in the Host; and western from eastern rites over the calendar, at the very least—neither Orthodox nor Uniates had Corpus Christi celebrations of their own. The same sorts of variations on a general pattern found in the rules for selecting annual elders shaped the range of strategies adopted in reconciling multiconfessional “brotherhood” with nearly exclusively Roman Catholic religious obligations. In many cases (though not all ), a system of “buying out” was established, whereby a guild member
22
ACW, 460. For Tobias Krumbeich, see ACW, 443, 449; Lietuvos Valstybės Istorijos Archyvas (Lithuanian State Historical Archive, Vilnius) [hereafter LVIA] 1008.1.42, 266r, 286r, 306r. For Michel Engel, see LVIA 1008.1.42, 258v, 306r. 24 On the religious obligations of the guilds, see Józef Morzy, “Geneza i rozwój cechów wileńskich do końca XVII w,” Zeszyty naukowe Uniwersytetu im. A. Mickiewicza, Seria Historia, (Poznań: 1959), 90–1. 23
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who did not wish to attend services at the Roman Catholic guild altar could pay a fee to the guild box (usually earmarked at least in part for the upkeep of that altar). I cite two examples from the many. In 1636 the goldsmiths (a heavily Lutheran guild) reiterated a provision of 1627 allowing “those of various religion” to buy out of their obligations to the guild altar at the Jesuits’ Church of St. John. The fee remained 3 zł.25 In articles approved by the magistracy on 28 May 1639, the weavers, who in 1604 had simply imposed a penalty upon all for absence from the guild Mass, now adopted the institution of buying out for masters, their wives, and their journeymen “of a different religion”: the price was 1 zł per quarter for the master and 12 gr for a journeyman (it is unclear what the price was to be for the master’s wife).26 In this last instance, we encounter a limitation that would be placed time and again upon the practice of buying out: a guild member might absent himself from various religious observances connected with the brotherhood’s altar, but he was required to participate in funeral services for a brother, and the penalties—there was no provision for buying out here—could be severe. The capmakers’ guild, for instance, had enacted a statute on 3 December 1636, in which they shared power equally between those of the “Roman” and those of the “Greek” religion. Only the Romans were required to participate in Corpus Christi processions, and only the Romans were to attend to the guild altar at the Bernardines, but all were to take part in the funerals of guild members, or at least of their masters: When any of the masters of the cap- and hatmakers’ craft should die, the younger brethren will be obliged to dig the hole and put the body in the hole and carry it on the bier, and others are to accompany the body with honor, all together, both Greeks and Romans to the [Roman] church, as also from the Roman side to the [Greek] church, and bury it fittingly. And if anyone should be absent from the funeral, he is to pay four gr to the guild as a penalty, and if he should not be there a second time, he is to give eight gr, and for the third time he is to give 16 gr, and if he should not come a fourth time, he is to be punished by imprisonment by the magistracy at the request of the elders until he makes satisfaction.27
25 26 27
ACW, 173, 215. ACW, 219. ACW, 212.
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And other guilds—hatmakers, glaziers, coopers, fishermen, wheelwrights, white-leather tanners, masons—made other requirements that, at the least, would have brought non-Catholics into Roman Catholic funeral services, and perhaps also vice versa.28 Similar considerations sometimes governed negotiations between Christian and Jewish practitioners of the same trade. In one case, Christian and Jewish artisans agreed upon a sort of limited, carefully structured coexistence under one guild statute. On 22 April 1673, representatives of the Christian needle makers’ and tinsmiths’ guild came before the magistracy, together with two named Jews (Kałman Aranowicz and Ulf Józefowicz), as well as two other Jews whose names were not recorded. They together signed a “voluntary letter of concord.” The provisions came in response to “the ancient great harm” the Christian guild had suffered from Jewish competition. They granted four Jewish tinsmiths—“and no more”—a kind of adjunct guild membership. The Jewish artisans would pay 30 zł as a group—or 7 zł, 30 gr each, the contract allowed either solution—to the guild for the upkeep of its altar at the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Trinity. The Jewish tinsmiths were to be granted the right to sell door to door. It further freed them from the obligation to join in the guild’s public processions, both secular (greeting the arrival of the king or other dignitaries) and religious (Corpus Christi).29 At Home and in the Neighborhoods Many—perhaps most—of Wilno’s artisans worked at home, thus questions of co-existence in the workplace of necessity spilled over into questions of shared living spaces. A conflict between Christian and Jewish butchers raised the issue of cohabitation of rooms between members not only of various confessions, but even of various religions. In the course of the lengthy court battle, among other charges, the Christian side alleged that “they [the Jewish butchers] entice to themselves Christian apprentices (czeladź), who, having caused not 28 See the articles for: hatmakers etc., 1582 (ACW, 94); weavers, 1639 (ACW, 219); glaziers, 1663 (ACW, 267); coopers, 1664 (ACW, 290); fishermen, 1664 (ACW, 295); tanners, 1672 (ACW, 375); wheelwrights, 1674 (ACW, 384); white-leather tanners, 1680 (ACW, 402); masons, 1687 (ACW, 434). 29 AVAK 29, 37–8.
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inconsiderable harm to their masters, and having incurred debt with them, depart from them; and they [the Jewish butchers] receive them and maintain them [i onych przechowywają; my emphasis].”30 The allegation would imply that Christian apprentices were living with Jewish master butchers. The 1663 statute of Wilno’s Christian glaziers declared in article 47 that “those apprentices, who up to now have spent their years in study with Jews . . . just as those who had been with a ‘bungler’ [partacz—an artisan working outside guild structures and discipline]” would have to complete the required service with a Christian master before they would be admitted to the guild.31 The fear was of economic competition from the Jewish artisan and the Christian “bungler,” but the point remains: Christians served apprenticeships with Jewish masters, and in Jewish quarters. Provisions (here, from the cobblers’ guild in 1689) for the reception of “wandering journeymen of whatever religion (jakiejkolwiek religjej) who have come to Wilno,” so long as they produce documents proving “free and honorable birth,” and “completion of an apprenticeship” (wyzwolenie), points to a more widespread cohabitation of rooms by co-professionals of the various Christian confessions.32 But where were those rooms? Did property owners and the heads of households who rented dwellings in them form neighborhoods delimited by confession and religion? A reading of surveys done by the Royal Quartermaster in preparation for the arrival of King Władysław IV Waza in 1636 and 1639, coupled with other documents that reveal confessional allegiances, suggests that owners of houses in Wilno congregated in streets and neighborhoods that were heavily Lutheran, Calvinist, Roman Catholic, or Ruthenian (Uniate and Orthodox largely together), although there were documented exceptions to the rules in every instance.33 We find members of the Lutheran elite in upper Castle Street (especially the left, western side between 30
AVAK 28, 408. See ACW, 275. 32 ACW, 454. 33 The surveys, which are at the base of my study of neighborhoods and networks in early modern Wilno, are to be found at Biblioteka Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego (Library of the Jagiellonian University, Cracow), Berlińskie Zbiory (manuscripts from the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz) [hereafter BUJ, B Slav.] F. 12 and F. 15. The first one (that for 1636) is now published in Polish transcription with an annotated Lithuanian translation in Mindaugas Paknys, Vilniaus miestas ir miestiečiai 1636 m.: namai, gyventojai, svečiai (Vilnius: 2006), where entries from the second manuscript (for 1639) are also provided when they differ dramatically from the first. 31
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Skop Street and St. John Street) and in German Street; the middling sort of merchant and artisan in and around Glass Street; and more modest artisans, especially “white-leather tanners” on both sides of the little tributary of the Wilenka, near the Royal Mill below that limit, and in the Szerejkiszki suburb above it. Calvinists gathered in modest numbers across from their Lutheran cousins (often literally!) on the right, eastern side of upper Castle Street. Ruthenians seem to have occupied at one time much of the eastern side of the city, to the right of the Castle Street-Market Square-Rudniki Street axis, where a thick network of their churches (cerkwie) was once to be found. By the 17th century the number of their churches had declined somewhat, but they were still congregated on the eastern side of the Market Square and below, on both sides of Sharp Street. Roman Catholics could now be met throughout the city, nobles in German Street, Castle Street, and especially in Dominican and Troki Streets. By the 17th century, Catholic churches could been found throughout the city, but they were the only places of worship in this last neighborhood, forming a dense network along and to the northwest of the St. John Street-Dominican Street-Troki Street axis, and to the north and west toward the walls, where Catholic burghers were predominant. Poorer Catholics occupied the houses of the Chapter Jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church in and around Skop and Bernardine Streets. Suburbs beyond the various gates seem to have mirrored the intramural streets leading up to them, with, for instance, some numbers of Ruthenians outside Subocz and Sharp Gates, Catholics in the suburbs beyond Troki and Wilia Gates, Lutherans in the Antokol and Szerejkiszki suburbs beyond Castle Gate, etc. Tatar Gate, in turn, led to the Tatar settlement in the Łukiszki suburb. But, again, these were only concentrations, nothing like monoconfessional neighborhoods, to say nothing of ghettos, and numerous exceptions can be documented for every rule. Peculiarities of the various surveys conducted of Wilno houses during the 17th century allow us to make this pattern especially clear in the case of Jewish settlement.34 The Jewish community of Wilno differed from those of Cracow and Warsaw (to choose two other capital cities of royal residence) in
34 On Jewish settlement patterns in Wilno, see David Frick, “Jews and Others in Seventeenth-Century Wilno: Life in the Neighborhood,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 12 (2005): 8–42.
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two crucial regards. First, settlement was established much later here than in Cracow and Warsaw, where Jewish immigrants began to arrive in some numbers from Germany and Bohemia in the later-14th and 15th centuries. Indeed, Wilno was late by the standards of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where Brest, Grodno, and Pińsk first comprised the Lithuanian Va’ad or “Council of the Chief Communities.” The Va’ad was established as a body of self-governance separate from the Jewish Council of the Chief Communities of the Polish Crown lands in 1622/1623. Wilno would be named one of the “chief communities” only 30 years later, in 1652. Second, unlike Cracow or Warsaw, where the Jews were banned from residing within the walls of the old cities (in 1495 and 1483 respectively), Jews would establish themselves in the heart of Wilno and were thus more of a constant presence for their Christian neighbors.35 Although it is certainly possible to discern the outlines of a Wilno neighborhood in which Jews were preponderant, the neighborhood was never—at least in the 17th century—uniquely Jewish. The triangular section of the city (German Street-Jewish Street-Meat Shop Street) that had been proposed for Jewish occupation behind gates became largely Jewish, but not entirely so, and it was left ungated. And St. Nicholas Street, which also belonged to the official Jewish “quarter,” was a kind of dangling appendage across German Street and could not be gated effectively. To get to it from the “Jewish Triangle,” you had to cross German Street, which—although Jews lived there legally (in two houses only) and illegally—was still a street in which Christians (primarily Lutherans and Catholics) occupied some of the city’s better houses. What is more, many Jews continued to live elsewhere in the city and suburbs. Surveys conducted in 1636, 1639, 1676, and 169036 tell us two things: that Jews continued throughout the 17th century to 35 On patterns of Jewish settlement in Poland-Lithuania in general, see Gershon David Hundert, “Jewish Urban Residence in the Polish Commonwealth in the Early Modern Period,” The Jewish Journal of Sociology 26 (1984): 25–34. 36 The third was a census conducted by Jewish elders of Jews living in the Castle Court jurisdiction in Wilno, which was the forum for nobles, Jews, and Tatars. It is to be found at LVIA SA 4691, ff. 476r–v/David Frick, Wilnianie. Żywoty siedemnastowieczne (Warsaw: 2008), 313. The fourth set stemmed from the separate hearth tax surveys done in 1690 for houses subject to the Magdeburg jursidiction and the synagogue, transcribed in Andrzej Rachuba (ed.), Metryka Litewska. Rejestry podymnego Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego. Województwo wileńskie 1690 r. (Warsaw: 1989), 25–62.
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live scattered in Wilno’s various Christian neighborhoods (although, curiously, not among the Ruthenians),37 here as renters of dwellings in Christian houses (and together with the Christian landlord and his Christian renters); and that Christians dwelled in Jewish-owned houses in the “Jewish neighborhood.” The situation with the Christian “neighbors” (sąsiad, pl. sąsiedzi—in many forensic genres a technical term for renters of dwelling spaces within one house) is more difficult to assess, since those who conducted (and read) these surveys were entirely uninterested in confessional distinctions among Christians, and the “neighbors” have largely remained anonymous in our sources. Still, one document makes it absolutely clear that the “neighbors” of one house might well represent a range of confessions. In response to allegations in 1646 that—in spite of their removal extra muros in 1640—the Calvinists were continuing to meet and to hold religious services and synods at their old seat near the Bernardines, officials canvassed the “neighbors” in one house to discover what they had seen and heard: And first of all, when Mr. Daniel Hanke, a citizen and merchant of Wilno, was questioned, he testified sub conscientia [by his faith] that here, where we have been living for several years, there have never been any church services or congresses or commotions. Then we went to a weaver by the name of Jan Tum, a German, and we asked him about the above mentioned things. And he also testified by his word that he and his journeymen had neither seen nor heard any of those things. Then we went to a tailor by the name of Hendrych Heyn, asking him whether any congresses or church services of the Evangelical religion had taken place since the above mentioned time. He, too, testified by his word that there had never been any of the aforementioned things. Then we went to a second weaver by the name of Piotr Kant. He, too, witnessed by his word the same as the others. Finally we went to Iwan Bielski, tailor, also living there in the very gate to the estate, and he testified to the same thing by his word—that there had been neither commotions, nor any sort of congresses, nor Evangelical church services. All the above-mentioned
37
On the “high degree of violence that both sides originated, which [characterized Orthodox-Jewish relations, but] was not typical of relations between the Jews and the Catholic and Uniate Churches,” see Judith Kalik, “The Orthodox Church and the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” Jewish History 17 (2003): 229, 231, 232.
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david frick artisans are citizens of Wilno and guild members, some of the Catholic religion, some of the Saxon, others of the Ruthenian Uniate religion.38
This is a unique forensic document, in that it identifies Christian citizens of Wilno by their confession. It is obvious to what end the investigators made an exception to the rule in this instance: the fact that “neighbors” of a variety of confessions—none of them Calvinist—all agreed on the matter lent added weight to their testimony exonerating the Calvinists. But what is important for us is that the document suggests that, for instance, a Catholic-owned house in a neghborhood of predominately Catholic proprietors may have given shelter to otherwise anonymous “neighbors” of a variety of confessions. Most noteworthy, in this instance, is the presence of Lutherans. This was a neighborhood where there was not a single Lutheran property owner in 1636 and 1639, and far from neighborhoods of concentrated Lutheran settlement, and yet, a chance document reveals a Lutheran “neighbor.” Christians of all confessions also lived in close proximity to Tatars in the Łukiszki suburb, where we find second, extramural houses, manors, and gardens of the city’s ruling elite, as well as the sole residences of more modest Vilnans. In 1639 a mysterious “Obduła”—apparently an unbaptized Tatar named Abdullah—owned a house of three chambers just inside Troki Gate, an exception to the rule on Tatar settlement. That year, during the king’s stay in town, he was providing quarters to “[a member/members of] the infantry of His Lordly Grace, Crown Under-Chancellor [Jerzy Ossoliński].”39 Houses of that time and place were not designed for privacy. No city dweller was ever totally alone before the changes in attitudes and architectures of the 18th century. Inventories indicate that the core of a dwelling space for one family unit was the heated chamber (izba), which might be somehow conjoined to a vestibule (sień), an alcove (komora), perhaps also a kitchen. But there were no shared corridors providing access to “private” apartments. “Neighbors” often had to
38 From the “Official Report” (Kwit relacyjny) of “generals” Stefan Gromacki and Krzysztof Towżyn, found in Lietuvos Nacionalinė Martyno Mažvydo Biblioteka (Martynas Mažvydas Lithuanian National Library, Vilnius) [hereafter LNMB] F93–1714, ff. 3r–v/Frick, Wilnianie, 488–9. A “general” (generał) was a “general bailiff ” for the nobles’ Castle Court. In the usage of early modern Poland-Lithuania, “evangelical” referred to Evangelical Reformed Christians, elsewhere known as Calvinists; Lutherans were called “Saxons” or “Christians of the Augsburg Confession” in Wilno. 39 BUJ, B Slav. F. 15, f. 37r/Paknys, Vilniaus miestas, 160, 257.
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walk through each other’s rooms to get “home.” At best they might enter their own space by way of the wooden galleries perched around an internal courtyard at the level of every floor beginning with the second. A series of outdoor stairwells connected the ground with the galleries. But even this architectural feature—of limited use for access to interior rooms and alcoves—could not provide what we think of as privacy. Neighbors using the galleries as their path home would constantly see, hear, and smell what was going on in the other neighbors’ spaces as they walked past the courtyard windows.40 Think, at a minimum, of the olfactory sensations in the spring as the new-calendar Vilnans (all the Romans—Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists) were feasting, and their old-calendar neighbors (the Greeks—both Uniate and Orthodox) were still fasting.41 Levels of Allegiance: Between Zealotry and Indifference It is a fairly simple matter to marshal, on the one hand, strictures of priests and pastors (no doubt of rabbis and mullahs, if we had the documents for Wilno at this time) against commingling with the various and several “others” in a range of life situations, from baptism to burial; and, on the other hand, to demonstrate that Vilnans regularly ignored these prohibitions. More difficult is an assessment of attitudes, of levels of intensity in allegiance to the various confessions. Evidence can be mustered that points in both directions. Lay Vilnans represented a spectrum of attitudes, from the most exclusive to the most inclusive. A couple examples from each extreme will have to suffice here.
40
See Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: 1962), 398–9 for a classic statement of the fact that, before the architectural innovations of the 18th century, no one was ever alone. For considerations of the lack of specializations of rooms, the lack of corridors, and the sleeping and eating arrangements necessitated by the layout of 17th-century houses, see Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality in Early Modern France, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge, UK: 1979), 92–7, 98–102, 102–10. 41 On the calendars of early modern Wilno, see David Frick, “The Bells of Vilnius: Keeping Time in a City of Many Calendars,” in Lesley Cormack, Natalia Pylypiuk, Glenn Berger, and Jonathan Hart (eds.), Making Contact: Maps, Identity, and Travel (Edmonton: 2003), 23–59.
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One place to look for evidence is in testamentary bequests. We find some Vilnans who gave only within their own confession. One of them placed special emphasis on this fact. This was Orthodox merchant Paweł Kossobucki, who, in his will of 2 July 1689, stipulated that his grants to Ruthenian institutions throughout the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were to be limited to those that were “Orthodox, not being in the Union.”42 He was, in fact, unusual in both regards: most gave to more than one confession, and most limited their giving to Wilno and its suburbs. Other cases, somewhat more typical, can be found where Vilnans gave, for instance, to a range of Roman Catholic institutions, and only that confession, but all of them of Wilno.43 Unlike Kossobucki, others of the Greek rite—my impression from reading the extant sources is that this was the more frequent pattern—saw themselves as belonging to a very much local, Vilnan, panRuthenian world. Whether they were themselves Uniate or Orthodox, they often gave to institutions from both Ruthenian confessions, and excluded both the Protestants and the Roman Catholics. This is one of the more surprising results of fleshing out neighborhoods and networks in 17th-century Wilno. Contrary to the descriptions of the confessional polemicists—some of whom lived, wrote, and printed in Wilno, and sometimes described local events in the struggle between the Uniate and the Orthodox Churches after 1596—Ruthenian Vilnans were more than happy to unite the two warring camps. Orthodox merchant Siemion Jakubowicz Czapliński had been a member of the first merchant sexagintavirate on the Greek side in 1602.44 He lived in a house on the eastern side of the Market Square where we still find a Ruthenian presence in 1636 and 1639. He drew up his last will and testament on 3 June 1630, which means that his adult life had played itself out against the backdrop of the introduction of the Union of Brest, the Uniate confiscation of Orthodox churches in Wilno, the establishment of the new Orthodox Holy Spirit monastery and church, the altercations between Orthodox burghers and the Uniate Metropolitan of all Rus’, Hipacy Pociej, the tensions over the “illegal” reestablishment of the Orthodox hierarchy in 1620, and
42
LVIA 610.3.103, ff. 3v–4r/Frick, Wilnianie, 158–9. See, for example, the testament of royal secretary and burgomaster Stefan Karaś at LVIA SA 5339, ff. 18v–19r/Frick, Wilnianie, 215–6. 44 Kowalenko, “Geneza udziału,” 136. 43
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the battle of the pamphlets in the early 1620s that were initiated from the Wilno presses.45 He died shortly before King Władysław IV recognized the Orthodox hierarchy and imposed a relatively peaceful coexistence of Uniate and Orthodox hierarchies. And yet, his deathbed bequests were to both “Greek” religious communities. He asked to be buried “according to Christian custom in the [Orthodox] Church of the Holy Spirit.” He bequeathed sums of money to the fathers (100 zł) and to the nuns (50 zł) at that same church. He also gave 20 Lithuanian k to the hospital at that church, as well as 10 zł to the altar of St. Constantine “where our crypt is . . . at the Church of the Holy Spirit.” But his gifts to the Uniates were equally impressive, if not even more generous. He gave 400 Lithuanian k to the Uniate Church of the Holy Spirit against the house in which he was living, “under this condition, that the fathers of the Holy Trinity are never to take this sum, rather they are to take the interest on this sum, 40 k every year, and pray to God for my soul constantly, publice [publicly] and privately.” Further, he gave 20 k to the nuns at the Uniate Holy Trinity; and he gave various sums to Uniate hospitals— 10 k to the Holy Trinity, five k to the Holy Most Pure, and five k to St. George in the Rossa Suburb.46 Lutheran wills sometimes revealed a sense of local German solidarity that reached across the Lutheran-Catholic divide. Chamois-tanner Hanus Meler, who lived in the Szerejkiszki suburb signed his will on 7 November 1648. He asked to be buried “fittingly, not sparing the necessary cost, according to the Christian custom of the rite of the Augsburg Confession in the customary place.” His bequests were quite specific, and the amounts, and their ordering, are revealing: 200 zł to the Saxon church; 25 zł to the Saxon hospital; 25 zł to the “German hospital of the Roman religion”; 5 Lithuanian k to the hospitals at the Roman Catholic Churches of Mary Magdalene, SS. Joseph and Nicodemus, St. Stephen, and the Holy Trinity.47 And there were those who gave an indiscriminate alm to “all the hospitals that are in Wilno at this time, both in the city and in the suburbs”—this from the will 45 The literature on the conflict between the Orthodox and the Uniates is large. For a biography of one of the main local participants—Meletij Smotryc’kyj, onetime Orthodox archbishop of Połock and archimandrite of the influential monastery at the Wilno Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit—see Frick, Meletij Smotryc’kyj. 46 LVIA SA 5335, ff. 308r–v. 47 LVIA SA 5361, ff. 251r–v/Frick, Wilnianie, 456.
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of Lutheran swordsmith Melchior Ilis, but examples among the other confessions can also be found.48 Other phenomena—the use of non-Catholic godparents for Catholic babies, and without comment by the recording priest,49 as well as the frequency of mixed marriages—also suggest a willingness on the part of some, including perhaps parish clergy, to cross confessional boundaries, to make accommodations with neighbors of other confessions in a wide range of life moments. Or, at the least, to look the other way when others did so. Some constellations of human networks and shared neighborhoods were more readily formed than others— Lutheran-Calvinist, Orthodox-Uniate—but tokens of all possible permutations can be found. This was not exactly the same thing as the “indifferentism” that some revisionists have sought to establish as a corrective to, and in some cases in opposition to, the top-down etatism of confessionalization paradigms.50 How, for instance, are we to interpret the following case? A Uniate salt merchant by the name of Afanas Otroszkiewicz was willing to marry an Orthodox burghess by the name of Katarzyna Kuryłowiczówna and to share a house with her in the suburb outside Sharp Gate; but when it came time, shortly before their deaths in the spring and fall of 1666 respectively, for the two to draw up their wills (for which they clearly drew on the same notarial help), the one wished to rest eternally in the hallowed ground of the Uniate Church of the Holy Trinity, and the other chose the Orthodox Church of the Holy Spirit just across the street.51 The two establishments had been
48
LVIA SA 5333, ff. 320r, 321r-v/Frick, Wilnianie, 291–2. See David Frick, “Buchner at the Font: Godparenting and Network Building in Seventeenth-Century Wilno,” in Christopher Ocker, Michael Printy, Peter Starenko, and Peter Wallace (eds.), Politics and Reformations: Communities, Politics, Nations, and Empires. Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (Leiden: 2007), 205–27. 50 See, in particular, the articles by Nicole Grochowina, “Grenzen der Konfessionalisierung. Dissidententum und konfessionelle Indifferenz im Ostfriesland des 16. Und 17. Jahrhunderts”, Frauke Volkland, “Konfession, Konversion und soziales Drama. Ein Plädoyer für die Ablösung des Paradigmas der ‘konfessionellen Identität’”, and Martin Mulsow, “Mehrfachkonversion, politische Religion und Opportunismus im 17. Jahrhundert—Ein Pläydoyer für eine Indifferentismusforschung” in Kaspar von Greyerz, Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, Thomas Kaufmann, and Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), Interkonfessionalität—Transkonfessionalität—binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität. Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionalisierungsthese (Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte) 201 (Heidelberg: 2003), 48–72, 91–104, and, 132–50. 51 LVIA SA 5335, ff. 80v–82v/Frick, Wilnianie, 246–8; LVIA SA 5335, ff. 215v–217v/ Frick, Wilnianie, 248–51. 49
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the focal points of the intense confessional-political debate between Uniates and Orthodox in the city, the pamphlet wars on occasion spilling over into alleged physical violence. Does their case bespeak confessional indifferentism? Or zeal? Or are we dealing with types of allegiances and accommodations that are not adequately described in such terms? How It Worked; or, Tolerating the Intolerable The picture that has taken shape over the course of my work on Wilno emphasizes collaboration, coexistence, syncretisms, crossings of confessional, sometimes even religious, boundaries—in short, a general sameness. Part of this is due to the rhetorical uniformity of the sources that are my window on this world. But another part, an essential aspect, I would argue, lies in the consensus of some important segment of all the confessions and religions that certain compromises were required, “if only” for the sake of peace and prosperity. Being right about religion would have to yield some of its absoluteness to the common civic weal. This is not a story of precocious ecumenicism, of the tolerance only imagined by a few contemporary thinkers and which would become a central topic of more general debate only with the Enlightenment. This is a story of toleration, of finding a set of practices—some of them implicated in violence, or at least in adversarial relationships—that allowed individuals and communities to co-exist, sometimes cheek by jowl with people who were hated, or, at the very least, held for incorrigibly pig-headed. Violence was a constant in this society, where everyone carried a sword or a knife or a stick, or could pick up a rock or a brick, and where complaints against drunken neighbors were common. Larger outbreaks of violence, those directed against one group of people (typically Jews, Calvinists, or Orthodox) were sporadic, and—a fact that has been overlooked by most students—they were highly scripted in terms of their dramatis personae, stage settings in the town and suburbs, and time (with most occurring during Carnival or Lent).52 The picture that emerges here is a version of what David Nirenberg has called “communities of violence.” He argues in that path-breaking 52 The exception is Urzula Augustyniak’s recent reassessment of the anti-Calvinist riots of 1639. See Augustyniak, “Jeszcze raz.”
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study of the persecution of minorities—in his case, Jews and Muslims in 14th-century France and the Crown of Aragon—that there is “no reason why convivencia need designate only harmonious coexistence.” Writing against both the “lachrymose” and the “optimistic” historiographic schools, he notes that “violence was a central and systemic aspect of the coexistence of majority and minorities.” In short, “convivencia was predicated upon violence; it was not its peaceful antithesis. Violence drew its meaning from coexistence, not in opposition to it.” As in late medieval France and Aragon, so, too, in 17th-century Wilno, “the majority of altercations took place within religious communities, not across them.” Those that did occur across the boundaries of religious communities regularly took the form of “ritualized aggression.” One central aspect to this constant “background static of violence” was recourse to violent words—name calling, and its rule-based extension and culmination in litigation.53 In most cases, we know of the events of violence to person, property, and honor only because the wronged individuals and groups came themselves or sent representatives before the various legal jurisdictions of Wilno in order to bring charges against the alleged perpetrators of that violence. Early modern Poland-Lithuania was a highly litigious place, and—although all who could afford going to court could, and probably most did, seek the legal advice of notaries or lawyers—some knowledge of the law and of the rhetorical expectations of various forensic genres seems to have been widespread.54 People went to court to defend honor as often as health and property. The nobles may have felt otherwise, but the broad recourse to the courts by burghers of all social strata, as well as by Jews and Tatars, suggests that nearly everyone in 17th-century Wilno felt he had honor to defend or lose, in addition to property and “health.”55 In this regard, Jews and Tatars, although clearly identified as such, were just as much Vilnans as were 53 For the quotes, see David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: 1998), 8, 9, 245, 32, 210, 229, 127, 30–31. 54 Not all could afford it. Oswald Balzer notes (Studia nad prawem polskiem [Poznań: 1889], 331–2) that in 1726 the fee for filing a complaint in court in Lithuania was one zł per sheet of paper, plus other associated fees. My reading of the Wilno court cases suggests that access was easier and cheaper in some of the smaller jurisdictions such as those of the Roman Catholic Chapter. 55 For a discussion of the place of litigation over honor in early modern Muscovite society, with extensive literature on Muscovy and Western Europe, see Nancy Shields Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca: 1999).
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the Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Orthodox, and Uniates when they pressed their claims, side by side with the others, before the Wilno courts. They were all engaged in what has been called “continuous litigation,” a process that, so Edward Muir has argued, helped build civil society in early modern northern Italy. It was one of the mechanisms of integration that allowed a place as diverse as Wilno to function in relative peace.56 It is time to highlight a few of the distinguishing features of confessional coexistence in Wilno and briefly to suggest points of comparison with contemporary European cities elsewhere on the spectrum between exclusivity and inclusivity.57 No member of the five recognized Christian confessions was forced to make do with private or domestic religious services; all had a public place of worship with a church spire and bells. Before 1640, none were made to practice Auslauf, the system of “toleration,” whereby the tolerated lived within the city walls, but were obliged to practice their religion elsewhere, either openly, by proceeding en masse, perhaps singing hymns as they went, or clandestinely, slipping one by one through the gates to open places of worship in the suburbs or nearby estates.58 Only the Tatars lacked a place of worship within the walls for the whole period. The case of the Calvinists after 1640 approachs that of Auslauf but with some qualifications. They relocated just outside the walls, which in Wilno were never very imposing and had little legal significance. Calvinists who lived in the suburbs were subject to the Town Hall, just as their intramural cousins. Calvinist ministers might continue to visit the sick within the walls, although they were now required to wear clothing that could not be confused with that of a priest, and funeral processions were to proceed without singing of hymns until they reached the suburbs.59
56
On the importance of notarial culture and the habit of continuous litigation for creating social cohesion, see Edward Muir, “The Sources of Civil Society in Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1999): 379–406, especially 392–400. 57 Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith. Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2007) offers a nice set of examples which can serve as a point of departure for such a comparative study. 58 For examples of Auslauf, see Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 87, 145–9, 161–71, 176–7, 203, 208, 250. A classic example is provided by Hamburg and Altona. See Joachim Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg 1529–1819 (Cambridge, UK: 1985). 59 See documents at Lietuvos Mokslų Akademijos Biblioteka (Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Vilnius) F40–1136, 116; LNMB F93–1713, f. 1r.
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Wilno’s multiconfessionalism predated not only the Reformation but even the introduction of Roman Christianity as a sort of state religion in the Grand Duchy in 1386. Its system of Greek-Roman parity, introduced in 1536, also preceded the establishment of the first open Protestant congregations. This system came to accommodate the entire range of five confessions, and even after participation in the magistracy was limited to Catholics and Uniates in 1666 it continued to serve as a model for other secular corporations. What makes Wilno unusual is the open inclusion of four “other” confessions, in spite of pretensions on the part of Roman Catholics to dominance. Not “two confessions in one city” (the title, of course, of Paul Warmbrunn’s classic 1983 study of four imperial parity cities) but five, members of which must have been adept at negotiating a landscape of subtly and constantly shifting oppositions.60 No doubt Jews and Tatars were aware of articulations in the local Christian world, which must have added complexities to the Christian-Jewish and Christian-Muslim opposition that was otherwise so clear cut. Wilno, and perhaps other cities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (as Stefan Rohdewald’s study of Połock suggests),61 stand in stark contrast even to those of the Polish Crown, often portrayed as a bastion of tolerance on the European stage. Even a city like Lwów (L’viv), the multiconfessional, multiethnic capital of Red Ruthenia (subject to the Polish Crown since 1349) represented something quite different. Here, Roman Catholics, most of them Polish immigrants managed—almost until the First Partition of Poland, which brought the city into the Hapsburg realm—to maintain a monopoly of power in the magistracy and in the guilds, forcing the Orthodox, and later Uniates, as well as the large Armenian Christian population, to focus its religious and
60 For studies of “two confessions in one city,” see Paul Warmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen in einer Stadt. Das Zusammenleben von Katholiken und Protestanten in den paritätischen Reichsstädten Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg und Dinkelsbühl, 1548 bis 1648 (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz) 111 (Wiesbaden: 1983); Etienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze. Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806 (Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg) 33 (Sigmaringen: 1991); Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578–1620 (Oxford: 1995). 61 Stefan Rohdewald, “Vom Polocker Venedig.” Kollektives Handeln sozialer Gruppen einer Stadt zwischen Ost- und Mitteleuropa (Mittelalter, frühe Neuzeit, 19. Jh. bis 1914) (Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des östlichen Europa) 70 (Stuttgart: 2005).
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cultural activities in separate corporations granted limited autonomies and privileges.62 One imagines the surprise of a visitor from outside, even from as nearby as the Polish Crown lands, perhaps that of the Royal Quartermaster himself, as he registered the cacophony of the bells; the competing and intersecting religious and secular processions; the variety of dress, grooming, and speech patterns, and the occasional, more and less gentle, mutual derision; the simultaneity of feasting and fasting; the sense of passing from neighborhood to neighborhood, in each of which one set of customs might predominate, but tokens of all varieties might be present, at times in the same family; and above all the sense that all this variety could be expressed publicly and in all corners of the city. A Lutheran visitor from Ulm marveled in 1585 at a city where “all the religions, companies, and sects have libertatem conscientiae [freedom of conscience], in which no one is hindered.”63 He would likely still have experienced a sense of wonder had he returned there a century later, in spite of—or perhaps precisely because of—all the steps taken during that period in the “re-Catholicization” of the Polish-Lithuanian elites.
62 See Myron Kapral’, Nacional’ni hromady L’vova XVI–XVIII st. (Social’no-pravovi vzajemyny) (L’viv: 2003). 63 Cited in Edmund Klinkowski, “Grodno, Wilna und das Posener Land in einem deutschen Reisebericht vom Jahre 1586,” Deutsche wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für Polen 30 (1936): 135.
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INDEX
a Lasco, Johannes (Jan Łaski), 370–371, 384–386, 387, 389, 391, 392 The Form and Manner of Ecclesiastical Ministry, 386 Summary of the Doctrine of the Church of East Frisia, 385 Aachen, 59n49, 373 Abercorn, Earl of, 321 Accord of 2 September 1566 (Antwerp), 77–79, 89, 97, 101, 104 Acts of Uniformity (England, 1558/ Ireland, 1560), 317 Adrianople, Peace of (1568), 397 “age of confessions” (Wolfgang Reinhardt), 9, 12, 25 Agreement of the People (Levellers movement), 296, 356 Alais, Peace of (1629), 223 Albert (Archduke of Austria, 1598–1621), 55, 63, 64 Albrecht V (Duke of Bavaria, 1550–79), 141 Alkmaar (Holland), 52–53 Alsace, 181, 188, 196, 198–202. See also Colmar Althusius, Johannes, 390 Alva, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo (Governor of Spanish Netherlands, 1567–73), 80, 81, 103 Amboise, Edict of (1563), 247, 251, 255, 259 Amboise (France), 280 America, 29, 347, 365 Amersfoort (Utrecht), 65, 71 Amiens (France), 255, 260 Amsterdam (Holland), 52, 65, 70, 105, 118, 123, 350, 358 toleration in, 352, 354, 360, 363 Anabaptists/Anabaptist Church, 27, 33, 35, 38–39, 41 in Central Europe, 374, 379, 382, 399 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 53, 75, 78, 88, 92, 103, 349, 361, 362 in Holy Roman Empire, 154 Angevin dynasty, 371
Anglicans/Anglican Church, 8, 215, 289, 295, 298, 308, 313, 314, 317, 344–345 Angoulême (France), 281 Anne of Denmark (Queen of England, Ireland and Scotland, 1589–1619), 291, 315 Annonay (France), 228, 241, 248 annus mirabilis (1566–67), 76–81 Anti-Trinitarians/Anti-Trinitarian Church. See Unitarians Antinomian Controversy, 344 Antrim (Ireland), 321, 324, 339 Antwerp (Brabant), 15, 114. See also Calvinists; Catholics; Lutherans Accord of 2 September 1566, 77–79, 89, 97, 101, 104 churches in, 78–79, 87, 90, 92 civic militia in, 81, 85–86, 87, 90, 101, 107 coexistence in, 75–76, 78, 79, 87–88, 92, 93–94, 115 economic importance of, 16–17, 74, 95, 96–97 conflicts in, 79–80 Counter-Reformation in, 96, 97 local government and politics, 13, 75, 76, 81, 89, 92, 94, 96 Broad Council, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97 multiconfessionalism in, 76–81 Religious Peaces (1578/1579), 83–89, 90–95, 97, 105–108 repression and persecution in, 75, 81, 83 shooting companies in, 81, 87, 90 toleration in, 95–96 Apostles’ Creed, 38, 385, 410 Argentat (France), 229 Arians/Arianism (Transylvania), 409, 410, 413 Armagh (Ireland), 332 Armenians, 382, 442 Arminians/Arminian Church in Dutch Republic, 64, 350, 361, 362, 363 in England, 294
478
index
arms, carrying of (France), 220, 223, 279–282, 283, 284 Arnhem (Gelderland), 67, 117 Arpad dynasty, 371 Arras, Union of (1579), 93 articles of faith. See Confessions Artois (Spanish Netherlands), 83, 105, 107, 110 Augsburg, 5–7, 10–11, 13, 106, 119, 149, 153, 156, 199 Augsburg, Diets of (1530/1555), 27, 29, 33, 133–134, 160 Augsburg, Peace of (1555), 134–137, 143, 144, 317 and Antwerp, 84, 88 and Colmar (Alsace), 183, 202, 203 and Imperial Knights, 159, 161, 167, 174, 178 recognition of Augsburg Confession, 31, 135, 145, 148 Augsburg Confession, 28, 29, 30, 34, 38, 42, 88, 102n6, 133, 135–136, 401 and Colmar, 185, 202, 203 points of doctrine, 35–36 recognition of, 31–32, 33, 41, 145, 148 Augustine, Saint, 381 Confessions, 29 Augustinians (Colmar), 182, 200 Auslaufen (“walking out”), 145, 441 Austin, John (William Birchley), 365 The Christian Moderator, 356, 357 Baarle-Hertog (enclave, States Brabant), 67 Bacon, Sir Francis, 344 Baden-Durlach, Margraviate of, 144, 151 Baillie, Robert, 361 Ballybay (Ireland), 339 Bamberg, Prince-Bishopric of, 15, 17, 167, 168 Imperial knights in, 165, 166, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175 baptism, 35, 36, 38, 41, 153, 226, 302, 413, 438 Baptists/Baptist Church (Britain), 304, 307, 309, 346, 349, 353, 354 General Baptists, 298, 305 Particular Baptists, 297, 305 places of worship of, 299, 300, 301, 302 public functions of, 305, 312 Barre-des-Cévennes (France), 243 Barrier Treaty, 119 Basel, 186, 187, 190, 191, 193, 384
Basel, Council of (1431–49), 390 Baunach (Holy Roman Empire), 174–175 Bauquemare, Jacques, 248, 252, 253 Bautzen (Holy Roman Empire), 146 Bavaria, 138, 141, 144, 162n14 Bayeux (France), 277 Bayle, Pierre, 365, 390 Bayonne (France), 280 Beaulieu (France), 228–229 Beguines (Dutch Republic), 52, 71 Bekker, Balthasar, 60 Belgic Confession, 24, 28, 29, 30, 32, 36, 42 Bellings, Richard, 320 bells, church, 184–185, 195, 272–273, 443 Ben Israel, Menasseh, 359 Benedict, Philip, 217, 221 Berendrecht (Spanish Netherlands), 63 Berg, Duchy of (Holy Roman Empire), 59 Berge (Holy Roman Empire), 129–130 Bergen op Zoom (States Brabant), 57, 58, 62, 63, 68, 112 Bergh, Maria Elisabeth II van den (Marchioness, States Brabant), 68 Bergsma, Wiebe, 53, 60 Beza, Theodore, 214 Biberach (Swabia), 149 biconfessionalism. See also coexistence, confessional; multiconfessionalism; toleration in Colmar (Alsace), 179, 191, 192, 193, 203 definition, 100, 130n4 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 58, 84, 101, 103, 104, 109, 118, 119–125 in France, 101, 217, 223, 238, 283, 284 in Holy Roman Empire, 101, 135, 146, 147 in Transylvania, 408 Biddle, John, 304 Bill of Rights (1689), 314 Bischofszell (Swiss Confederation), 11–12 Blackwood, Christopher, 346, 353 Blasphemy Act (1650), 297 Blessed Sacrement, confraternities of (France), 211 Blois (France), 261, 280 Bockskay Rebellion (1605), 375 Bodin, Jean, 390
index Bohemia, 106, 176, 317, 358, 370, 394 Hussites in, 370, 371, 372, 377 toleration in, 374–375 Utraquists in, 371, 378, 395 Bohemian Brethrens/Bohemian Brethren Church, 1 in Bohemia, 379, 395 in Czech Republic, 29 in Poland, 382, 386 Bologna (Italy), 374, 384, 387 Bona Sforza (Queen of Poland, 1518–57), 373 Book of Concord, 31, 42 Book of Consecration, 39 Boom, H. ten, 52 Bordeaux (France), 274, 281, 282 border towns, 59, 62–65, 145, 277, 277–278, 280 boundaries confessional, 12, 131–132, 147–149, 152, 153, 180 political, 62–68, 73 Bourgneuf, René de, 251n41, 253 Brabant, 81, 82, 105, 110, 112, 116. See also States Brabant Brabourne, Theophilus, 363 Brandenburg, Prince-Bishopric of, 147, 149, 150n89, 151, 176n69 Breda, Declaration of (1660), 308 Breda (States Brabant), 57, 67, 94, 112 Breitenfeld, Battle of (1631), 176 Brenz, Johannes, 386 Brest, Union of (1596–97), 379–380, 421, 425, 436 Brethrens. See Bohemian Brethrens Briçonnet, Guillaume (Bishop of Meaux), 210 Britain, 8, 14, 19. See also Commonwealth of England; England; Ireland; Scotland Brittanny, 222, 227 Brussels, 89, 96, 118 Bucer, Martin, 385 Buchelius, Arnoldus, 61 Bullinger, Heinrich, 30, 41, 385, 409 Buob, Michael, 179, 183, 187, 202 Burgundy (France), 280, 282 Burnet, Gilbert, 349 Butler, James (Duke of Ormond), 307, 323 Byzantines (Bohemia), 372, 373 Caen (France), 228, 241, 243, 245, 248 Calignon (peace commissioner), 279
479
Calvin, John, 23, 211, 214, 215, 377, 385, 386, 388, 391 Institutes of the Christian Religion, 210, 382 Calvinists/Calvinist Church. See also Presbyterians; Reformed Church in Alsace, Colmar, 186, 187–188, 189, 191, 193, 194, 204 in Bohemia, 379 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 47, 49, 104–105, 370 Antwerp, 75, 82, 91, 95, 96 expansion of, 79, 86, 89, 97 in local government, 81, 90, 94 proposing religious peace, 84–85 public worship by, 76–77, 79, 80, 82, 86, 87, 92 recognition of, 77–79 tensions with Lutherans, 79–80, 94 border crossing by, 63–64, 145 Brabant/States Brabant, 82, 84, 96 enclaves, 66 Friesland, 53 Gelderland, 100, 117, 122 Groningen, 50 Holland, 52–54, 103, 105, 108 Limburg/States Limburg, 58–59, 100, 119–122 opposition by, 111, 114, 115, 116 Overijssel, 51, 117 and pacification, 89, 105–106 public worship by, 71 Zeeland, 105, 108 in France. See Huguenots in Holy Roman Empire, 7, 64, 138, 145, 147, 151, 394 Rhenish Calvinism, 186, 187, 188 in Hungary, 370, 370n2 in Lithuania, 370, 385 Wilno, 374, 392, 421, 423, 430, 431, 433, 435, 438, 439, 441 in Poland, 379, 382, 385 in Transylvania, 375, 376, 409 Canne, John, 303 Capuchins (France/Alsace), 189, 193, 200, 234, 237 Cassan, Michel, 229, 230 Casteljaloux (France), 243 Castellio, Sebastian, 214, 341 Castelmoron (France), 232 castle churches (Dutch Republic), 67, 71 Castres (France), 221, 227–228, 276
480
index
Catherine de Medici (Queen of France, 1547–59), 214, 215, 216, 239 Catholic Federation (Ireland), 321 Catholic League, 15, 157, 171, 172–173, 174, 177, 218 Catholics/Catholic Church, 41, 136, 390 Catholic Reformation, 54, 55–56, 99, 156n3, 157. See also CounterReformation in Central Europe, 371 Bohemia, 317, 374–375, 378 Lithuania, 376 Wilno, 417, 419, 422, 423–424, 425, 426, 427, 430, 431, 434, 435, 436, 441 Poland, 370, 372, 375, 379, 382 Red Ruthania, 442–443 Transylvania, 376, 400, 401, 402, 403–404, 406, 408, 410 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 52–56, 62–63 border crossing by, 62–63, 64–65 Brabant/States Brabant, 57–58, 71, 111, 112, 116, 123 Antwerp, 75 in local government, 95, 105 opposition by, 79 processions, 90, 91 public worship by, 92, 94, 113–114 repression and persecution of, 93, 109 and Spaniards, 81, 93, 97 enclaves, 66–67 equal rights of, 48–49, 109, 118, 123–124 Flanders/States Flanders, 55, 57, 89, 116, 123 Friesland, 53 Gelderland/Upper Gelderland, 54, 67, 71, 100, 111, 117, 122, 123 Generality Lands, 57–58, 65, 123 Holland, 54, 71, 85, 104, 107, 108 Amsterdam, 52, 65, 72, 123, 350 laws against, 50 Limburg/States Limburg, 58–59, 100, 120–122 Overijssel, 117, 123 public worship by, 69–70, 100, 358 Utrecht, 52, 53, 65, 67, 71, 117, 123 violence against, 105, 108 Zeeland, 54, 85, 107, 108 in England laws against, 292, 294, 309, 312, 319
public functions of, 290, 305–306, 309, 312 public worship by, 295, 296, 297, 311 repression and persecution of, 289, 290–291, 293, 306, 310, 314, 358 taxation of, 315 toleration of, 292, 298, 311, 351 tolerationists, 356–359 in France, 257, 270, 348 control of communal space, 270–279 and disarmament, 279–282, 283 local coexistence with Huguenots, 14, 224–228, 283–284 in local government, 261–262 and pacification, 216, 218–223, 236, 240–245, 258–260 processions, 233, 271 public worship by, 272 violence between Huguenots and, 209, 211, 212–213, 218, 221–222, 229–231, 233–238, 241, 244, 271, 273 in Holy Roman Empire, 64, 64–65, 129, 139, 141, 142, 164 Colmar, 179, 184, 189–190, 191, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200–201, 204 Imperial Knights and, 156, 157, 161, 162 local coexistence with Lutherans, 142, 146, 149, 152–153 processions, 138, 200 public functions of, 10, 189–190, 191, 193, 196, 197, 198 public worship by, 10, 145, 146, 149, 151, 152–153, 204 in Ireland, 290, 322, 323, 324, 327, 328, 329, 333–334, 338–339 laws against, 319–320, 335 public functions of, 312, 320, 331–332 repression and persecution of, 307, 314 Ulster, 307, 310, 314, 321, 324, 337 Nicene Creed, 28, 33, 38, 39–40, 55 in Scotland, 310, 311 Tridentine, 162, 163, 177, 330, 347 Cellarius, Johannes, 183 cemeteries (France), 221, 231–232, 233, 235, 267, 271 Central Europe, 5, 8, 343, 369–371, 376–381
index Central Europe (cont.) government and politics in, 371–375, 373 legal system, 394 multiconfessionalism in, 8, 14, 19, 370, 374, 379 toleration in, 343 Chadwick, Owen, 343 chalices, 141, 371, 378 Châlon-sur-Saône (France), 241, 244, 246, 249 Charles I (King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1625–49), 289, 291–294, 296 Charles II (King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1649–51/1660–85), 289, 308–309, 310, 317, 318 Charles IV (Luxemburg Emperor, 1346–78), 372 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor, 1519–56), 75, 101, 133, 155n2, 358 Charles IX (King of France, 1560–74), 214, 239, 240, 241, 247, 250, 255 Chillenden, Edmund, 299, 304 Christ, nature of, 411–412 Christian Concord, Articles of (1566), 410 Christin, Olivier, 241, 255 Christophe von Stadion (Bishop of Augsburg), 5–6 Church of England, 8, 215, 289, 295, 298, 308, 313, 314, 317, 344–345 Church of Ireland, 307, 317, 321, 326, 329, 333, 334, 337, 339 Church of Our Lady (Antwerp), 90, 92 churches building and rebuilding of, 55, 78 church bells, 184–185, 195, 272–273, 443 clandestine, 52, 63, 69–72, 100, 125 Huguenot, 255–257 peace churches, 149 sharing. See simultanea Cicero De Amitia, 247 citizenship vs religion, 217–218, 219–220, 237, 248 civic militia (Antwerp), 81, 85, 86, 90, 101, 107 Clarendon Code (1661–1665), 308 Clement VI, Pope, 372 Clement VIII, Pope, 291 Cleves, Duchy of (Holy Roman Empire), 64–65
481
Cloet, Michel, 55, 56 Cluj (Transylvania), 401, 414 coequal multiconfessional regimes (Holy Roman Empire), 145–146, 149, 151, 179, 196, 204, 205 coetus, 386 coexistence, confessional, 18–19, 121, 222. See also biconfessionalism; multiconfessionalism; toleration at workplace, 429–430 in Colmar (Alsace), 181–182, 184, 188–189, 194 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 47–48, 54–57, 60–61, 69, 85 Antwerp, 75–76, 78, 79, 87–88, 92, 93–94 economic importance of, 16–17, 74, 95, 96–97 Friesland, 51, 53 Gelderland/Upper Gelderland, 50, 54, 111, 122–123 Generality Lands, 57–59, 122 Holland, 51, 52–53, 107 Limburg/States Limburg, 58–59, 111 Utrecht, 51, 53 Zeeland, 50, 54, 107 in France, 106, 209, 214, 222, 224–228, 234, 237, 260 in guilds, 424–429 in Holy Roman Empire, 19, 106, 129, 130 in Wilno (Lithuania), 424–429, 441 Coligny, Louise de, 68 Collegium Germanicum (1552), 163, 164–165 Colmar (Alsace), 13, 15, 16, 191, 193. See also Calvinists; Catholics; Evangelicals; Lutherans biconfessionalism in, 179, 184, 187, 191, 192, 193, 203, 204 coexistence in, 181–182, 184, 188–189, 194 French rule of, 180, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196–202, 203, 204–205 guilds in, 180–181, 182, 183, 189, 194, 196, 199 immigrants in, 188, 194, 195–196, 198 ius reformandi in, 183, 184, 191, 204 local government and politics, 181, 184, 187, 190, 193, 194, 196–197
482
index
Colmar (cont.) merchants in, 188, 195 reformation and CounterReformation in, 179, 182, 183–194, 196, 199–202, 203, 204 simultanea in, 202, 205 Swedish rule of, 191, 193, 200, 202, 203, 204 taxation in, 184, 188–189, 191, 194, 195, 198, 201 tensions in, 185–186, 192, 195 Cologne, Peace Conference of (1579), 93 Cologne (Holy Roman Empire), 64, 117, 163 commissioners (France). See peace commissioners Commonwealth of England (1649–60), 26, 298, 302, 306, 307 Communion, 36, 134, 141, 183, 215, 293, 314, 388, 390, 401, 413 Communitas mercatoria (Wilno), 424 Comprehension and Toleration Bills (England), 309, 313 Compromise of Nobles (1566), 76 concentric multiconfessional regimes (Holy Roman Empire), 146–147, 149, 179 Concord, Formula of, 185 condominia, 58, 119–120 Confederates (Ireland), 307 confession, 4, 9, 10, 12, 26 Confession of Faith (1525, Hans Denck), 24,27,30 confessional choice, 10, 325–329, 336 confessional coexistence. See coexistence, confessional confessional identification, 11, 12, 16–17, 129, 153 confessional states, 14, 99 Bohemia, 317 England, 289, 290, 311, 344 Ireland, 317, 317–318, 319, 320, 323, 324, 325, 338 confessionalization, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 25–26, 329 Confessions Augsburg Confession, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35–36, 38, 41, 42, 88, 102n6, 133, 135–136, 185, 202, 203, 401 Belgic Confession (1561), 24, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 36, 42 Confession of Faith (1525, Hans Denck), 24, 27, 30 definitions in and of, 23–24, 41–43
Dordrecht Confession of Mennonites (1632), 34, 42 Eleven Articles (1559–60), 30, 34 Fidei ratio (1530), 24 First Confession of Basel (1534), 34 First Helvetic Confession (1536), 34, 36 Forty-Two Articles (1553), 30, 34 French Confession (1559/71), 28, 29, 30, 34–35, 36, 37, 102n6, 211 Geneva Confession (1536), 34, 36, 37, 38 parallels and differences, 24, 27, 28, 34–35, 36, 40–41, 129, 141–143 Schleitheim Confession (1527), 29, 33, 34, 35, 41 Schwabach Articles (1529), 30 Scots Confession (1560), 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37–38 Second Helvetic Confession (1566), 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42, 409 Six Articles (1543), 30, 34 Sixty-Seven Articles (1523), 24, 27, 30, 43 Tetrapolitan Confession (1530), 27, 29, 32, 34 Thirteen Articles (1538), 30, 34 Thirty-Nine Articles of England (1563), 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 38–39, 42 Torgau Articles (1530), 30 Tridentine Profession of Faith (1564), 30, 42, 55, 97, 162 Westminster Confession (1647), 28, 34, 42 conflicts, religious. See also wars in Antwerp, 79–80 in France, 154, 254, 261 in Holy Roman Empire, 137, 153, 154, 156, 162, 167–168, 174, 176, 178 Congregationalists/Congregationalist Church (England), 299, 301, 305, 312, 362. See also Independents Connacht (Ireland), 321, 324 conscience, freedom of, 100, 102–103, 216, 223, 407, 408, 443 Constance, Council of (1415), 380 Constantinople (Ottoman Empire), 373, 380 Conventicle Acts (England), 319 conversion to Catholicism, 56, 95, 96, 149–150, 156, 164, 223, 237, 337
index conversion (cont.) forced, 95, 96, 135, 156, 164, 169, 223, 237, 414 to Reformed Church, 162, 414 Cook, John, 305, 336 Coppin, Richard, 304 Cork (Ireland), 325, 329 Corpus Christi, 185, 200, 258, 427, 428 corpus evangelicorum, 148, 150, 152 Cossé, Marshal, 248 Council of State (England), 299, 301, 302, 303, 359 Council of State (Low Countries), 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 106 Council of Troubles, 80 Counter-Reformation, 211 in Antwerp, 96, 97 in Colmar (Alsace), 180, 189–191, 196, 199–202, 203, 204 in Holy Roman Republic, 151, 153, 156, 163, 166, 167, 168, 169, 176, 177–178 Covenanters (England), 343, 360, 362 Coxe, Leonard, 387 Cracow (Poland), 373, 382, 387, 389, 390, 423–424, 432 Cranmer, Thomas, 30, 34, 38, 385 Crécy (France), 372 Cristuru Secuiesc (Transylvania), 415 Crofton, Zachary, 302–303 Cromwell, Henry, 307 Cromwell, Oliver, 8, 289, 295, 297, 299, 301, 305, 306, 307, 358, 359, 360 Cromwell, Richard, 306 Crouzet, Denis, 212, 213 Crypto-Calvinists, 192 Crypto-Protestants, 142–143 cuius regio, eius religio, 84, 135, 144, 147, 217, 317 Dalhem (States Limburg), 58, 120 Damville (Henry de Montmorency), 249 Danzig (Poland), 382 Dávid, Ferenc, 376, 402, 409, 410–412 Davis, Natalie Z., 212, 271 The Sacred and the Body Social, 270 De Rijp (Holland), 54 Debrecen (Transylvania), 409 Decapolis, 180 Declaratio Ferdinandea, 135, 136 Deklarationsschrift (Andreas Sandherr), 185–186, 187, 204 Delft (Holland), 53
483
Dell, Wilhelm, 352 Den Bosch (States Brabant), 57, 62, 71, 111 Denck, Hans Confession of Faith, 24, 27, 30 Deventer (Overijssel), 51, 117 Diefendorf, Barbara, 212, 213 Dieppe (France), 281 Dijon (France), 248, 272, 276, 279 Dinkelsbühl (Holy Roman Empire), 149 dissenters in Britain, 289, 295, 309, 310, 313, 314, 315, 322, 323, 338, 349 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 48, 49, 51, 53, 56, 66, 68, 69, 71, 101, 123, 125 Holy Roman Empire, 145 Dominicans/Dominican Church in Antwerp, 87–88 in Colmar (Alsace), 182, 189, 200, 201 Donauwörth Affair (1608), 138 Dordrecht, Synod of (1578), 84 Dordrecht Confession of Mennonites (1632), 34, 42 Dordrecht (Holland), 53, 84, 104 Dorren, Gabrielle, 61 Dort, Synod of (1618–19), 27, 29, 64, 109, 350 Dortmund, Treaty of (1609), 146 Drenthe, 108 Dublin, 307, 318, 321, 324, 327, 334, 338, 339 Duivenvoorde, Hendrika van, 68 Dury, John, 359 Dutch Reformed Church, 5, 7, 18, 29, 32, 41, 47, 49, 60, 100, 123, 351. See also Calvinists Dutch Republic (1581–1795), 15, 91, 109, 126ill. See also Antwerp; Calvinists; Catholics; Low Countries; Lutherans; Spanish Netherlands biconfessionalism in, 7, 49, 101, 117, 119, 121–122 clandestine churches in, 69–72 coexistence in, 13, 47, 50, 51, 60–61, 69, 85, 100 conflicts and violence in, 117, 121 and France, 112, 114, 116, 117–118, 121, 124 official church of, 7, 48, 100, 116, 123 political boundaries, 62–68 public worship in, 69–71
484
index
Dutch Republic (cont.) repression and persecution in, 113 and Spain, 116, 124, 350 States-General, 111, 113, 118, 119 toleration in, 18, 61–62, 72, 343, 346, 347, 349–355, 356, 361, 361–364, 362, 365 wars, 48, 59, 109, 110–112, 114, 116, 353 Dutch Revolt (1568–1609), 93, 100, 101, 105, 110, 350 East Frisia (Holy Roman Empire), 370, 385, 386 East Indies, 115, 346 Eberhard, Winfried Europa 1400: Die Krise des Spätmittelalters, 376 Ecclesiastical Reservation, 135, 156, 157, 163, 166, 175, 176, 178 economy confessional coexistence and, 75, 94, 96–97 edicts of pacification, 239, 247–249. See also peace commissioners Edict of Amboise (1563), 247, 251, 255, 259 Edict of January (1962), 247, 251, 266 Edict of Longjumeau (1568), 247, 251n41 Edict of Nantes (1598), 199, 218–223, 224, 228, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237 Edict of Restitution (1629), 156 Edict of Saint Germain (1570), 216, 217, 247, 248, 249, 251, 255 Edict of Turda (1568), 376 Reunion of Charges (1692), 197 Edward VI (King of England, 1547–53), 39, 385, 386 Edwards, Thomas, 295, 360, 361, 363 Grangraena, 361 Eichstätt, Prince-Bishopric of, 156, 168, 170, 171 Eighty Years’ War, 59, 109, 110–112, 114, 116 Eleven Articles (1559–60), 30, 34 Elizabeth I (Queen of England, 1558–1603), 289, 290, 297, 299, 327 Elster, Jon, 257 Emden (East Frisia), 64 enclaves in Dutch Republic/Low Countries, 65–67, 119
in Holy Roman Empire, 144–145, 167 England, 297. See also Catholics; dissenters; Independents; Presbyterians; Protestants confessional state in, 289, 290, 294, 295, 311, 314, 344 conflicts and violence in, 315 freedom of religion in, 295, 296, 297, 311, 313 Glorious Revolution (1688), 313 government and politics, 289, 294–295, 296, 297, 298–299, 301, 309, 311–312 legal system, 317, 318, 319 multiconfessionalism in, 289, 295–296, 304–305, 310, 314 repression and persecution in, 308–309, 310, 314, 358 Restoration (1660), 289, 290, 303, 308, 310, 317 simultanea in, 301–303 toleration in, 306, 309, 311, 313, 342–364 wars, 289, 290, 292, 293, 294, 353 England, Church of, 8, 215, 289, 295, 313, 317, 344–345 Englands Metamorphosis, or a Dialogue between London and Amsterdam, 363–364 Enkhuizen (Holland), 53, 352 Ensisheim (Alsace), 180, 182, 189, 190 entrenched multiconfessional regimes (Holy Roman Empire), 143–144, 179, 190 episcopacy, 294, 296, 298, 310 Episcopalians/Episcopal Church (Britain), 290, 296, 298, 300, 306, 310, 313–314 Episcopius, Simon, 362 Erasmus, Desiderius, 3, 158, 217, 224, 383–384, 385, 387, 389, 390 Ernst von Mengersdorf (Prince-Bishop of Bamberg), 165, 166 Essex (England), 308, 318 Eucharist, 1, 36–37, 38, 371, 378, 386, 392 Europa 1400: Die Krise des Spätmittelalters (Winfried Eberhard, Ferdinand Seibt), 376 Evangelicals/Evangelical Church in Central Europe, 394 Bohemia, 395 Transylvania, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 407, 408
index Evangelicals/Evangelical Church (cont.) in Colmar (Alsace), 184, 185, 189, 190, 191, 194, 198, 203 in Holy Roman Empire, 10–11, 199, 395 Family of Love, 103 Farnese, Alexander, 95, 110 Ferdinand I of Bavaria (Prince-Bishop of Münster), 129–130 Ferdinand I (Holy Roman Emperor 1558–64), 137n28, 155n2, 159, 385, 396 Ferdinand II (Holy Roman Emperor, 1619–37), 189, 203 Fidei ratio (Huldrych Zwingli), 24 First Confession of Basel (1534), 34 First Helvetic Confession (1536), 34, 36 Fisher, James, 301 Five Mile Act (England, 1665), 319 Flacius, Matthias, 79 Flanders, 55, 81, 82, 105, 110, 111, 116. See also States Flanders Florence, Council of, 380 Foa, Jérémie, 213, 270, 271 forgiveness, politics of, 258–260 Forty-Two Articles (1553), 30, 34 Foucault, Michel, 254 Fox, George, 304 Foxe, Paul The Reformation in Poland, 381 France. See also Catholics; Colmar; Huguenots access to communal space in, 270–279 biconfessionalism in, 101, 217, 223, 238, 283, 284 coexistence in, 19, 106, 209, 214, 222, 224–228, 234, 237, 260 confessional identification in, 17 conflicts and violence, 7–8, 154, 209, 211, 212–213, 214, 218, 221–222, 229–231, 233–237, 238, 261. See also Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre control of communal space in, 270–279 and Dutch Republic, 114–115, 116, 117–118, 121, 124 freedom of conscience in, 216, 223 government and politics, 13–14, 284 legal system, 394, 395 pacification in, 15, 84, 239, 240. See also edicts of pacification; Friendship Pacts
485
repression and persecution in, 210, 211 separation of citizenship and religion in, 217–218, 219–220, 237 toleration in, 214, 343, 346, 347, 348, 351, 356, 357, 358, 362, 365 wars, 102, 154, 212, 218, 220, 222, 223, 228, 233, 240, 244, 250, 260, 261, 265 Franciscans, 2 in Colmar (Alsace), 181, 202 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 62, 70, 79, 87, 120 in France, 210 in Ireland, 322–323 François I (King of France, 1515–47), 210, 211 François II (King of France, 1559–60), 211 François, Etienne, 153 The unsichtbare Grenze: Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg, 10 Franconia, Prince-Bishopric of, 144, 155, 161, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175 Frankfurt an der Oder, 147 Frederick III of Simmern (Elector Palatinate), 30, 31, 135 Frederick V (King of Bohemia, 1619–20), 173 Frederick Augustus I (Elector of Saxony, 1694–1733), 150 Frederick Wilhelm I (King of Prussia, 1730–40), 152 Frederik Hendrik (Stadholder of Dutch Republic, 1625–47), 100, 110–111, 114–115, 119, 124, 125 freedom of conscience, 100, 102–103, 216, 223, 407, 408, 443 freedom of religion, 341 in Britain, 289, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 306–307, 313 in Germany, 106 in Ireland, 307 in Low Countries, 83, 84, 85, 91 in Poland, 375, 381 freedom of worship, 82, 109 in Central Europe, 401, 441 in Dutch Republic, 109, 113–114, 116 in England, 296, 297, 311 in France, 283 French Confession (1559/71), 28, 29, 30, 34–35, 36, 37, 102n6, 211
486
index
French Reformed Church, 32, 41, 209, 238. See also Huguenots French Revolution (1789–99), 179, 197, 203 French Wars of Religion (1562–98), 212, 218, 228, 239, 240, 244, 250, 260, 265, 383 Fresne (Normandy, France), 232 Friedenskirchen (peace churches), 149 Friendship Pacts (France), 240–247, 248–250, 263–264, 268–269 Friesland, 51, 53, 60, 67, 107, 108 Fronde (France), 223 Fulda (Holy Roman Empire), 144 funerals (Wilno), 428–429 Furly, Benjamin, 349 Gábor Báthory (Prince of Transylvania, 1608–13), 399 Gábor Bethlen (Prince of Transylvania, 1613–29), 399, 413 Gallicanism, 215, 223 Galway (Ireland), 324, 337 Ganges (France), 226 gates, town (France), 273, 275–276 Gebürg (Holy Roman Empire), 174–175 Geertz, Clifford, 12 Gelderland, 15, 50, 54, 67. See also States Upper Gelderland Geleij Katona, István, 414 Gemert (enclave, States Brabant), 66 General Baptists (England), 298, 305 Generality Lands (Dutch Republic), 57–59, 66–67, 122 Geneva Confession (1536), 34, 36, 37, 38 Geneva (Swiss Confederation), 210, 352, 362, 379 George I (King of Great Britain and Ireland, 1714–27), 315 Germans/German-speakers in Lithuania, 421, 426, 437 in Poland, 373 in Transylvania, 397, 398, 400–401, 408 Germany, 106, 346, 356, 357, 362, 382. See also Holy Roman Empire Ghent, Pacification of, 81, 83, 84, 105 Ghent (Flanders), 82, 89, 96 Gijswijt-Hofstra, Marijke, 65–66 Glorious Revolution (1688), 313 God, nature of, 402, 403, 410–411 God and the king, 320 Golden v Hales (legal case, 1686), 311 Goll, Hans, 179, 183, 187, 202
Goodwin, John, 344, 346, 347, 351, 353 Gouda (Holland), 52, 70, 71, 104 Graft (Holland), 53–54 Grand Remonstrance (1641), 294 Grangraena (Thomas Edwards), 361, 363 Grave (Brabant), 110, 112 Great Assembly (1651), 109 Great Yarmouth (England), 305, 309, 312 “Greeks” (Wilno), 423–424, 425, 428, 435, 436, 437, 442 Greene, Thomas, 26 Gregorian calender, 185, 200 Greyerz, Kaspar von, 183, 185, 187 Groningen (Dutch Republic), 50, 107, 108 Grotius, Hugo, 350, 362, 390 guilds in Colmar (Alsace), 180, 182, 183, 189, 194, 196, 199 in Ireland, 338 in Wilno (Lithuania), 424–429, 430 Guise, Duke of, 212, 218 Gunpowder Plot (1605), 291, 319 Güntzer, Augustin, 188, 190, 192 Gustavus Adolphus (King of Sweden, 1611–32), 176 Guttenberg-family, 166, 170 György I Rákóczi (Prince of Transylvania, 1630–48), 413 György II Rákóczi (Prince of Transylvania, 1648–60), 408 Haag, Imperial County of (Holy Roman Republic), 144 Haarlem (Holland), 52, 61, 89, 104, 105, 107, 108 Habsburg dynasty, 48, 148, 155n2, 162n14, 176n69, 371 and Alsace, 180, 183, 188, 189–191, 193 and Hungary, 370, 375, 385 and Ottoman Empire, 375, 397, 404 and Transylvania, 395, 400, 416 Haecht, Godevaert van, 80 Haguenau (Alsace), 180, 183, 189, 194 Hainaut (Spanish Netherlands), 83, 105, 107 Halberstadt (Holy Roman Empire), 146, 149 Hamburg (Holy Roman Empire), 145, 151 Handel, Our Lady of (Gemert), 65, 66, 125
index Hanlon, Gregory, 221 Hannover (Holy Roman Empire), 150, 151 Hartlib Circle, 344 The Heads of the Proposals, 295 hedge sermons (Low Countries), 76, 101 Heidelberg, 151, 187 Heidelberg Catechism, 30 Henri II (King of France, 1547–59), 211 Henri III (King of France, 1574–89), 218, 358 Henri IV (King of France, 1589–1610), 112, 218, 222, 223, 230, 233, 240, 281, 329, 358 Henrican Revolution (England), 383 Henrietta Maria (Queen of England, Ireland and Scotland, 1625–49), 292–293 Henry Frederick (Prince of Wales), 291 Henslin, Beat, 187 heresy, 2, 212, 290, 375, 416 placards, 75, 76, 81, 83, 101, 103, 108, 113 repression of, 56, 75, 105, 294, 400 trials, 210, 211, 393, 414 ’s-Hertogenbosch (States Brabant), 57, 62, 71, 111 ’s-Hertogenrade (States Limburg), 58, 120 Hessen-Kassel (Holy Roman Empire), 150 Hohenzollern dynasty, 175 Holland, 99 ban on Catholic worship in, 67, 104 coexistence in, 51, 52–53, 107 pacification in, 81, 89, 95, 105, 108 toleration in, 18, 99, 103, 350 Holland Mission, 62, 64, 68 Holt, Mack, 212 Holy Roman Empire, 64–65, 217. See also Catholics; Lutherans coexistence in, 19, 106, 130, 131–132 conflicts and violence in, 154 enclaves in, 144–145 ius reformandi in, 131, 134–135 legal system, 132, 134, 135, 136, 136–137, 138, 394, 395 multiconfessionalism in, 7, 83, 101, 131, 154 pacification in, 83. See also Augsburg, Peace of; Westphalia, Peace of politics in, 13, 132, 144 toleration in, 346
487
wars, 131, 138, 139, 150, 160, 173, 176, 178, 189, 405 Honter, Johannes, 401 Hooker, Richard, 344 Horbourg (Alsace), 182, 183, 186 Horbourg-Riquewihr (Alsace), 180, 185, 186, 194, 204 Hosius, Stanislaus, 371, 387–389, 390, 391, 392 Confessio Catholicae fidei Christiana, 388–389, 392 Hotchkiss, Valerie, 4, 27, 29 House of Commons (England), 296, 297, 308, 309, 344 House of Lords (England), 296, 305, 309, 313 Hughes, William, 364 Huguenots (France). See also Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre access to communal space, 267, 270–279 carrying of arms by, 220, 223, 279–282, 281, 283, 284 conflicts and violence between Catholics and, 6, 209, 211, 212, 213, 218, 221–222, 229–231, 238, 241, 244, 273 legal status of, 236, 237, 394 local coexistence with Catholics, 14, 224–228, 233–237, 270–271 in local government, 220, 221–222, 261–262 obedience to Crown, 278, 283, 284 and pacification, 216, 218–223, 233, 234, 235, 239, 240, 259 places of worship of, 211, 219, 222, 230, 231, 236–237, 255–257, 267, 269, 271–279, 284 toleration of, 348 Huizinga, Johan Waning of the Middle Ages, 376 Hull (England), 303 The Humble Petition and Advice (second constitution of England, 1657), 297, 305 Hungarian-speakers (Transylvania), 397, 398, 401, 402, 410 Hungary, 106, 370, 371, 375, 379, 396, 397, 398, 404 Hunyadi, Demeter, 412 Hus, Jan, 1, 3, 377 Hussites/Hussite Church, 1, 2, 370, 371, 377, 379. See also Utraquists Hutten, Ulrich von, 6
488
index
hybrid multiconfessional regimes (Holy Roman Empire), 140–142, 147, 152, 179, 192, 204 iconoclasm, 3 in France, 212, 222, 229, 270 in Holy Roman Empire, 185 in Low Countries, 55, 76, 77, 79, 101, 108 immigrants, 188, 194, 195–196, 198, 422 Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat), 137n28, 190 Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht), 132, 134, 135, 136, 138, 148 Imperial Church, 156, 158, 159, 162, 163 Imperial cities, 135, 145, 146, 151, 181, 191, 193, 196, 199 Imperial commissions, 183, 184, 187, 189, 204 Imperial Diet (Reichstag), 132, 137, 147, 155, 162 Imperial garrison, 190, 191, 193, 203 Imperial Knights and Catholic League, 156, 157, 171, 172–173, 174, 177 ius reformandi for, 13, 161, 166–167, 172, 176 protecting Ecclesiastical Reservation, 156, 157, 163, 166, 175, 176 and Protestant Union, 171, 172, 173–175, 177, 187 recognition of, 156, 158–159, 160, 161 role and position in principalities, 157, 158, 161, 163, 164–166, 169–170, 176–177, 178 role in religious conflicts, 156, 162, 167–168, 174, 176, 178 Independents/Independent Church. See also Congregationalists in Britain, 296, 297, 305, 306, 307, 344, 348, 353, 364 and Presbyterians, 295, 351 public roles of, 301, 305, 309 in Ireland, 307 places of worship, 301, 309 and toleration, 351, 353, 356, 360–361, 362–363, 364 Indulgence, Declarations of (England, 1672/1687), 309, 311, 318 Institutes of the Christian Religion (John Calvin), 210, 382 The Instrument of Government (constitution of England), 297, 298, 307
intellectual freedom, 341 Interim of 1548 (Holy Roman Empire), 141 intra-confessional disputes, 78–80, 94, 187, 188, 192 Ireland, 15, 17, 314, 330. See also Catholics; Protestants confessional choice in, 325–329 confessional state in, 14, 294, 317–318, 319, 320, 323, 324, 325, 337, 338 conflicts and violence in, 319, 337 legal system in, 317, 318, 319–320, 322, 323, 331–333 multiconfessionalism in, 8, 289–290, 319, 323–325, 329, 335, 338, 339 parish structure in, 318, 333–334 plantation of Ulster, 318, 321, 331 repression and persecution in, 310, 312 social order in, 317, 327, 329, 330, 338, 339 taxation in, 324 toleration in, 340 wars, 320, 321, 330, 331, 335 Ireland, Church of, 307, 317, 321, 326 Irish Rebellion (1641), 320, 330, 331, 335 Isabella of Austria (Archduchess), 55, 63, 64 Israel, Jonathan, 109 István Báthory (Prince of Transylvania, 1571–86/King of Poland, 1576–86), 358, 397, 403, 426 István Bockskai (Prince of Transylvania, 1605–6), 397, 404 Italy, 347, 355, 371, 373 itio in partes, 148 ius reformandi, 148 for Imperial Knights, 161, 166–167, 172, 176 for individual estates of Holy Roman Empire, 131, 134–135, 137, 139, 148, 152, 183, 184, 191, 204 Jagiellonian dynasty, 371, 372, 375, 385 James I (King of England, 1603–25), 327 James II (King of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1685–88), 289, 292, 309, 310–312, 313, 326 James VI (King of Scotland, 1567–1625, James I of England after 1603), 291–292, 293
index Jan Kazimierz Waza (King of PolandLithuania, 1648–60), 424 János Szapolyai (King of Hungary, 1526–40), 396 János Zsigmond Szapolyai (King of Hungary, 1540–70/Prince of Transylvania, 1570–71), 375, 385, 396, 397, 398, 400, 402, 410 Janssen, Geert, 64 January, Edict of (1562), 247, 251, 266 Jeannin, Pierre, 113 Jerome, Saint, 373, 381 Jessey, Henry, 359 Jesuits, 87 in Alsace, 163–164, 177 Colmar, 189, 193, 200, 201 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 62, 79, 81, 97, 120 in France, 227, 230, 232, 237 in Ireland, 321, 338 in Lithuania, 427 in Transylvania, 403–404 Jews, 346, 357, 362 in Central Europe, 379 Poland, 359, 382 Transylvania, 399–400 Wilno (Lithuania), 374, 420, 422, 429, 430, 431–433, 439, 440, 442 in Dutch Republic, 125, 354, 359, 361, 364 in England, 298, 306, 314, 351, 354, 359–360 in France, 440 in Prussia, 359 in Rome, 84, 106 Johann Georg I (Elector of Saxony, 1611–56), 138 Johann Gottfried von Aschhausen (Prince-Bishop of Bamberg and Würzburg), 170, 174 Johann Philipp von Schönborn (PrinceBishop of Würzberg), 170, 176, 178 Johann Sigismund (Elector of Brandenburg), 147 Johann Wilhelm von Pfalz-Neuburg (Elector of the Palatinate), 150, 153 Johannes Christophe von Westerstetten (Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt), 171 John of Luxemburg (King of Bohemia, 1310–46), 372 Jordan, W.K., 364 Jouanna, Arlette, 239 Juan of Austria, Don, 81, 84
489
Jülich-Kleve-Berg, Duchy of, 141–142, 146, 171 Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn (PrinceBishop of Würzberg), 163, 165, 168, 174, 175 Junius, Franciscus, 103, 361 Kampen (Overijssel), 50, 51 Kaplan, Ben, 265 Karaim (Wilno), 419–420 Karaites (Poland), 382 Karl Alexander (Duke of Württemberg, 1733–37), 150 Karl III Philipp (Elector of the Palatinate, 1716–42), 151 Karlšteyn Castle (Bohemia), 373 Kelchbewegung, 371 Kerry (Ireland), 324, 336 Kevelaer, Our Lady of (Cleves), 64, 65, 125 Kiev, 380, 417 Kiffin, William, 297, 301, 305, 312 Kildare (Ireland), 324, 335, 336 Kłoczowski, Jerzy, 383 Knights’ Revolt (1522), 155, 164 Knox, John, 36 Kolenda, Gabriel (Uniate Metropolitan of Rus’, 1653–74), 425 Konfessionsbildung, 4, 10, 11, 13 Koran, 363 Kosman, Marceli, 419n3 Kraichgau (Swabia), 173, 174 Kronburg, Hartmut von, 164, 170 Kulmbach, Margrave of, 171, 174 La Boétie, Étienne de, 215 La Guesle, Jehan, 258 La Madeleine (peace commissioner), 248, 261 La Rochelle (France), 220, 248, 272 Lalaing, George de, 108 Land of Maas and Waal (Gelderland), 54 Languedoc (France), 220 Laon (France), 282 Laski, Jan. See a Lasco, Johannes Łaski-family, 389 Latillé (Poitou, France), 235 Layrac (Agenais), 221 Lectoure (Languedoc, France), 281 Lefèbvre d’Étaples, Jacques, 210 Leiden (Holland), 65, 103, 104 Leigh, Sir James, 326, 327 Leinster (Ireland), 324, 325, 336
490
index
Lenthall, William, 297 Leopold Anton von Firmian (Archbishop of Salzburg), 152 Lesser Poland, 370, 385 Letter of Majesty (Bohemia, 1609), 374 Leuven (Brabant), 62 Leveller movement (England), 295, 296, 297, 343, 344, 345, 356 L’Hospital, Michel de, 214, 215, 217, 224 Liberty of Conscience Asserted, 346 Liège, Prince-Bishop of, 58, 66, 119 Limburg, 58–59 Limburg Capitulation Treaty, 121 liminal multiconfessional regimes (Holy Roman Empire), 144–145, 147, 149, 179, 182, 186, 204 Limoges (France), 229–230, 245 Linck von Thurnburg, Sebastian, 179, 183, 186, 187, 202–203 Lisieux (France), 244, 258 Lithuania, 152, 370, 376, 382, 383, 385, 440. See also Wilno Locke, John, 349, 365 Lollards, 377 London, 294, 297, 299, 314, 318, 360, 363, 370, 385, 386 places of worship in, 301, 302, 303, 310, 311 Longjumeau, Edict of (1568), 247, 251n41 Lord’s Supper, 37–38, 79, 185, 302 Loriol (France), 282 Lorraine, Charles de, 215 Loudon (France), 225, 235 Louis XIII (King of France, 1610–43), 202, 220, 223, 233–234 Louis XIV (King of France, 1643–1715), 116–117, 118, 180, 196, 199–202, 223, 237 Louis XV (King of France, 1715–74), 198 Low Countries. See also Dutch Republic; Spanish Netherlands confessional arrangements in, 48, 101 Council of State, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 106 enclaves in, 65–67 political boundaries in, 62–68 States-General, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 106, 110 toleration in, 105, 348 Wonderyear, 76–81 Lublin (Poland), 372 Luebke, David, 179, 204 Łukiszki (Wilno, Lithuania), 419, 434
Luria, Keith, 271 Luther, Martin, 6, 23, 31, 41, 130, 209, 377, 388 Lutherans/Lutheran Church, 4, 31–32, 41, 136 in Colmar (Alsace), 179, 185, 188, 198, 204 in guilds, 196, 199 in local government, 187, 191–192, 193–195, 196–197, 200 places of worship of, 183, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205 in Central Europe, 377 Bohemia, 378, 379 Poland, 382, 386 Transylvania, 375, 376, 400, 401, 406, 408 Wilno (Lithuania), 374, 434, 435, 437, 438, 441 in guilds, 426, 427 in local government, 423 places of worship of, 421, 422, 430–431 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 66 Brabant/States Brabant, 89, 96 Antwerp economic importance of, 75, 94 official recognition of, 77–79 and pacification, 87, 88, 89 public worship by, 76, 77, 79, 80, 87, 91, 92 tensions with Calvinists, 79–80, 94 toleration of, 95–96 Flanders/States Flanders, 96 Holland, 52, 72 Limburg/States Limburg, 58, 59 places of worship, 63–64, 69–70, 125 Utrecht, 53 Woerden, 52, 66n75 in Holy Roman Empire, 141, 143, 154, 394 Imperial Knights, 156, 160, 161, 164, 165, 169 places of worship of, 129, 144, 146, 149, 152–153 public worship by, 144 tensions with Calvinists, 138 Orthodox, 185, 187, 203, 204 Philippist, 185, 203, 204 Luxemburg dynasty, 371, 372 Lyon, Council of (1245), 380
index Lyon (France), 215, 249, 253, 258, 260, 261, 270, 271, 274, 279, 280 Maas Campaign (1632), 111, 115 Maas and Waal, Land of (Gelderland), 67, 71, 100 Maastricht (Limburg of the States), 58, 100, 111, 119–120, 121, 122, 123, 124 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 370 Mâcon (France), 283 Magdeburg, 149 Magdeburg Law, 423 magistrates, 49, 99 in Antwerp, 81 in Colmar (Alsace), 181, 184–185, 187, 193–194, 196, 197 in Transylvania, 398, 400 in Wilno (Lithuania), 423–425, 426–427, 429, 442 Magnus, Johann Georg, 185, 186, 187 Maier, Hans Die Ältere deutsche Staatsund Verwaltungslehre (Polizeiwissenschaft), 254 Mainz, Prince-Bishopric of, 156, 158, 163, 164, 165, 170 Marans (France), 232 Marcourt, Antoine, 210 Margaret of Parma (Governor of Spanish Netherlands, 1559–67), 76, 77, 79, 80, 101 Marguerite of Navarre (Queen of Navarre, 1492–1549), 384 Maria Anna of Spain (Infanta of Spain), 291–292 Marnix of St Aldegonde, Philip of, 95, 96, 103 marriage of clergy, 377, 378, 388 mixed, 153, 168, 175, 225–226, 290, 292–293, 330, 438 Marseille (France), 280 Mary II (Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1689–94), 313 Mary Tudor (Mary I, Queen of England and Ireland, 1553–58), 290 Maspaurraulte, Pierre de, 253 Mass, 319, 333, 335–337, 338 Matthias of Arras, 372 Matthias of Austria (Archduke of Austria, 1608–19), 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 96–97, 106, 375 Maurits of Nassau (Prince of Orange, 1618–25), 110, 112
491
Maximillian II (Holy Roman Emperor, 1564–76), 82, 145, 183, 397 Maximillian of Bavaria (Duke of Bavaria, 1597–1651), 171 Mazarin, Cardinal, 223 Meaux (France), 210, 275 Mechelen Provincial Council (1607), 55 Mechelen (Spanish Netherlands), 55, 62, 96 Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 150 meeting houses (Britain), 309, 310, 311, 313, 314, 315 Melanchton, Philipp, 30–31, 41, 385, 389 Melchior Otto Voit von Salzburg (Prince-Bishop of Bamberg), 176 Melchior Zobel von Giebelstadt (PrinceBishop of Würzberg), 160 Méliusz Juhász, Péter, 410, 411 Melle (France), 225 Melotai Nyilas, István, 413 Memorandum on the critical state of the Low Countries and the means to cure them (William of Orange, 1566), 102 Mennonites/Mennonite Church, 34, 41 in Dutch Republic, 48–49, 50, 51, 52–54, 58, 59, 69, 70, 72, 100 in Holy Roman Empire, 64, 151 Mentzer, Raymond, 246 merchants, 188, 195, 424 Mesmes, Jean Jacques de, 258 Metz (France), 277–278 Meulan (France), 276 Michal Korybut Wiśniowiecki (King of Poland-Lithuania, 1669–73), 425 Millau (France), 241, 243, 245, 247, 248, 261 Millenarianism (England), 359, 364 Miłosz, Czesław, 374 Milton, John, 347, 349, 356 Minden (Holy Roman Empire), 143, 146, 149, 151 Modrevius, Andreas Fricius Andreae Fricci Secretarii Regii Sylvae Quattor, 391–392 Commentariorum de Republica emendanda libri quinque, 390, 391 Lascius sive de poena homicidii oratio prima, 389–390 Mohács, Battle of, 385 Mohyla, Peter, 380–381 Molyneux, William Case of Ireland . . . stated, 320 Monaghan (Ireland), 326, 336, 337, 339 Monluc, Jean de, (Bishop, France), 215
492
index
Monmouth Rebellion (1685), 310 Montaigne, Michel de, 215, 347 Montauban (France), 221, 260 Montélimar (France), 228, 248 Montferrand (France), 244 Mooij, Charles de, 58 Moravia, 1, 372 Morocco, 106 Moryson, Fynes, 379 mosques (Wilno), 419, 422 moyenneurs, 215 Muir, Edward, 441 Mulhouse (Alsace), 190, 191 Müller, E.F. Karl Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche, 27 Müller, Hektor, 5 multiconfessional regimes, 180 coequal, 145–146, 147, 149, 151, 179, 196, 204, 205 concentric, 146–147, 149, 179 entrenched, 143–144, 179, 190 hybrid, 140–142, 147, 152, 179, 192, 204 liminal, 144–145, 147, 149, 179, 182, 186, 204 subcutaneous, 142–143, 152, 179, 191, 204 multiconfessional states, 14, 289, 317, 375, 394–395, 396, 416 multiconfessionalism. See also biconfessionalism; coexistence, confessional; toleration in Antwerp, 76–81 in Britain, 289–290, 295–296, 304–305, 310, 314 in Central Europe, 370, 374, 375, 379, 382, 384, 399, 403, 405, 416–417, 442 definition of, 7, 100 Ireland, 289–290, 319, 323–325, 329, 335, 338, 339 Münster, Prince-Bishop of, 117, 129–130, 145 Münster, Sebastian Cosmographia, 376 Münster, Treaty of (1648), 48, 57, 59, 67 Munster (Ireland), 321, 324 Muscovy, 380 Muslims, 8, 440 Myron, Gabriel, 253 Namur (Spanish Netherlands), 118 Nant (France), 241, 247
Nantes, Edict of (1598), 15, 199, 218–223, 224, 228, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237 Nantes (France), 256, 269, 275, 276, 282 Nassau, Charlotte of, 229 nationalism, 369–370 Nayler, James, 298, 346 Nedham, Marchamont, 354 Neercassel, Johannes van, 118 neighborhoods (Wilno), 431–435, 438 neighborliness, 244–245, 337, 433–435 Neithard von Thüngen (Prince-Bishop of Bamberg), 166, 167–168 New Model Army (England), 295, 342, 353 New Testament, 26, 379 Newcastle (England), 294, 303–304, 312 Newcomen, Matthew, 345 Nicene Creed, 28, 33, 38, 39–40, 55 Nijmegen (Gelderland), 50, 101, 117 Nîmes (France), 221, 226, 227, 243, 248–249, 261 Nineteen Propositions (England, 1642), 294 Niort (Poitou, France), 226, 232, 233–234, 236–237 Nivernais (France), 281 nobility in Central Europe, 374, 375, 382, 394, 398, 400, 404, 408, 440 in France, 211 in Germany, 155, 158, 162–163. See also Imperial Knights “Nürnberg Standstill”, 134 Nyons (France), 225 oaths, 242, 243, 246, 248 Occasional Conformity (England), 314–315 Oecolampadius, Johannes, 6, 385 Oirschot (States Brabant), 64 Old Testament, 26, 343, 412 Oldenburg, Anna von (Regent of East Frisia, 1540–61), 385 Oosterweel (Brabant), 80 Oppenheim (Rhineland), 149, 153 Orange, House of, 66–67. See also William of Orange Orange (France), 228 Orléans (France), 249, 270, 275, 280, 282 Ormond, Duke of (James Butler), 307, 323 Ortenburg, Imperial County of, 144
index Orthodox/Orthodox Church, 372, 378, 380–381, 382 in Wilno (Lithuania), 392, 417, 421–422, 423, 425, 430, 435, 436–437, 438, 439, 441 in Ruthenia, 379–381, 417, 442 in Transylvania, 399, 405 Ortlieb, Conrad, 190, 193 Orzechowski, Stanislaw, 377 Osnabrück, Prince-Bishopric of, 129–130, 152–153 Ossoliński, Jerzy (Crown UnderChancellor of Poland), 434 Ottoman Empire, 106, 137, 346, 347, 375, 396, 397, 400, 404, 416 oubliance, 221, 222 Outer Austria, 180, 184, 189 Overijssel, 50, 51, 108 Overmaas, Lands of (States Limburg), 58, 59, 100, 119, 120–121, 122, 123, 125 Overton, Richard, 345, 349, 365 Oxford (England), 298, 312, 314 Pacification of Ghent (1576), 81, 83, 84, 105, 107, 110 Packer, Major-General, 346–347 Paderborn (Holy Roman Empire), 144 Padua (Italy), 374, 377, 384, 387 Pagans/Paganism (Lithuania), 376, 383, 417 pamphlet literature, 6, 113, 116, 137, 192, 255, 343, 345, 363, 437, 439 Papal States, 106 Papists, 255, 291, 408 Paris, 213, 219, 227, 229, 267, 357, 384 Paris, Parlement of, 210, 216, 217 parish structure, 333–334 Parker, Charles, 18, 63 Parlementarians (England), 344 Parliament (England), 294–295, 296, 297, 298, 309 Parthenay (France), 230–231 Particular Baptists (England), 297, 305 Partition Treaty (Dutch Republic/Spain, 1661), 120, 121 Partium countries (Hungary), 395, 397, 398, 401 Passau, Peace of (1552), 167 peace, religious, 214 in Britain, 312, 335 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 82–95, 97, 105–108, 109
493
in France, 240–245, 250, 258–263, 265, 266, 269–270, 284. See also edicts of pacification; Friendship Pacts peace commissioners (France), 224, 232, 239–240, 248–249, 250–251, 257, 265 general assemblies, 253–254, 255, 258–259, 261, 274 overview of, 252–253 politics of forgiveness, 258–260 selection and role of, 250–251, 263 peace treaties. See under place name of treaty Pelagianism, 390 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 4, 27, 29 penal laws (Britain), 309, 311, 312, 319 persecution, 84, 139 in Britain, 289, 290, 291, 300, 307, 308–309, 310, 311 in France, 216, 234 in Transylvania, 393 Perth, Articles of (1618), 293 Peter, Hugh, 349, 353 Peter Waldo, 1, 3 petitions, 253–254, 255 Petty, William, 322, 329 Pfalz-Neuburg, 150 Pfalz-Sulzbach, 150 Philip II (King of Spain, 1556–98), 77, 101, 103, 104, 109 Philip III (King of Spain and Portugal, 1598–1621), 109 Piast dynasty, 371 Piers, Sir Henry, 326, 327 pilgrimage (Low Countries), 63, 65, 71, 125 pillarization (Dutch Republic), 60 Plunkett, Oliver (Archbishop of Armagh), 310 Pociej, Hipacy (Uniate Metropolitan of Rus’, 1599–1613), 436 Poissy, Colloquy of (1561), 211, 214, 216 Poitiers (France), 230, 274 Poland, 106, 370, 371, 375, 377, 379, 382 freedom of religion in, 83, 381 legal system, 390 major Reformers in, 384–392 multiconfessionalism in, 383, 384 toleration in, 346, 347, 349, 351, 356, 358, 359, 362, 375, 381, 442 Poland-Lithuania, 19, 382, 394 polarization in Dutch Republic, 90, 93, 97, 108, 124 in Holy Roman Empire, 138, 178
494
index
Poles/Polish-speakers (Wilno), 423, 426, 443 Polish Diet, 375 political fragmentation, 4–5, 7, 8, 28, 144, 374, 382 politics of confession, 13 and confessional choice, 10, 329, 338 conflicting with religion, 3, 81, 93, 94, 96, 260 intertwining with religion, 76–80, 383 Politiques, 218 Pollmann, Judith, 61, 341 Pont-Saint-Esprit (France), 249 Pot de Chemault (peace commissioner), 261 Prague, 372–373, 378 Prague, Peace of (1635), 146 prayer-book, English, 293, 295, 296, 306 preaching, 76–77, 79, 86, 101 Přemysl dynasty, 371, 372, 373 Presbyterians/Presbyterian Church, 29, 351, 353, 361, 362 in Dutch Republic, 352, 360, 363 in England, 293, 295, 296, 297, 304, 345, 348, 358, 360 places of worship of, 298, 302, 303, 309 in Ireland, 307, 314, 318, 322, 323, 327, 334, 337, 339 in Scotland, 290, 293, 294, 307, 310, 311, 313, 347, 360 prince-bishoprics (Holy Roman Empire), 131, 134–135, 137, 139, 148, 152 princes, 149–150, 155, 156, 158, 160, 162, 171 principalities, ecclesiastical, 157, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164–166, 169–170, 175, 176–177 Prinsenhage (enclave, States Brabant), 66–67 printing press, 27–28, 327 private worship, 99 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 69–72, 100, 114, 116, 119 in France, 271–272 in Holy Roman Empire, 148, 189, 200 in Wilno (Lithuania), 441 processions in Antwerp, 90, 91, 92 in France, 211, 222, 229, 233, 258, 271
in Holy Roman Empire, 138, 145, 150, 185, 200 in Wilno (Lithuania), 427, 428 Profession of Faith, 28, 33, 39–40, 55 Protestant Coup (Lyon, 1562), 270 Protestant Union (Holy Roman Empire), 171, 172, 173–175, 177, 178 Protestants/Protestant Church, 390. See also Calvinists; Evangelicals; Lutherans in Britain, 290, 307, 309, 313, 319, 342–356, 385, 386 in Central Europe, 392 Bohemia, 317, 374–376 Lithuania, 152, 376, 427, 436 Poland, 370, 375, 382, 386 Transylvania, 375, 399, 400, 401, 408, 409 conversion to Catholicism, 156 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 63–64, 101 Brabant, 80, 105 Flanders, 56, 105 Gelderland/States Upper Gelderland, 101, 122, 123 Utrecht, 101 Walloon provinces, 105 in France. See Huguenots in Holy Roman Empire, 132, 139, 142–143, 144, 145–146, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 389 in Ireland, 307, 318–319, 322, 323, 324, 327, 328, 330, 331, 332, 335–337, 336–337, 338 in Switzerland, 362 “Protesters” (Presbyterians), 306, 310 Prynne, William, 360, 364 public worship, 86, 99. See also preaching; worship, places of in Dutch Republic, 69–71, 82, 103, 107, 118 in England, 295, 309 in France, 219, 231, 283 in Holy Roman Empire, 148, 151, 179 in Transylvania, 407, 408, 416 in Wilno (Lithuania), 421, 422, 441 Puritan Revolution, 342 Puritans, 52, 345, 348, 352, 359, 360, 364, 370 Pütter, Johann Stephan, 150 Quakers (Britain), 297, 298, 299–300, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 311, 334, 346
index Quelain, Michel, 253 Quincieu (peace commissioner), 258 Ravensburg (Holy Roman Empire), 149 Ravenstein, Land of (enclave, States Brabant), 66 Rawls, John, 354 Reformation, 1–3, 4, 19, 155, 158, 377. See also Counter-Reformation in Central Europe, 370 in Colmar (Alsace), 179, 182, 183–189, 191–194, 200, 202, 203 in Poland, 381–384 Reformed Church, 29, 30, 32, 148. See also Calvinists; Evangelicals; Huguenots; Lutherans in Central Europe, 29, 386, 394 in Dutch Republic, 5, 7, 18, 29, 32, 41, 47, 49, 60, 100, 123, 351 in France, 32, 41, 238 in Holy Roman Empire, 395 in Transylvania, 398, 399, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 407, 408–409, 410, 414–415, 416 Regensburg, Prince-Bishopric of, 145–146, 151, 162n14 Reichshofrat (Imperial Aulic Council), 137n28, 190 Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court), 132, 134, 135, 136, 138, 148 Reichstag (Imperial Diet), 132, 137, 147, 155, 162 Reinhard, Wolfgang, 9, 10, 25 “Religionsfried”, 82, 83n23 religious freedom. See freedom of religion Religious Peaces of 1578/79 (Antwerp), 83–89, 90–95, 91, 92, 97, 105–108, 109 Remonstrant Brotherhood (Dutch Republic), 50, 52, 64, 68, 69, 350 Rennes (France), 222 repression in Britain, 308–309, 310, 313 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 75, 80, 121, 350, 363 in France, 210, 211, 238 in Holy Roman Empire, 142 Rescius, Stanislaus, 387 “Resolutioners” (Presbyterians), 306, 307 Restitution, Edict of (1629), 156 Restoration (England, 1660), 8, 289, 290, 303, 308, 310, 317
495
Reuil, Treaty of (1635), 192, 202 Reunion of Charges (1692), 197 Rhegius, Urbanus, 6 Rhineland, 144, 155, 172, 173, 188 Rhön-Werra (Holy Roman Empire), 174–175 Richelieu, Cardinal, 114, 221, 235 Rijswijk, Treaty of (1697), 118, 150 Riquewihr (Alsace), 183, 190 Roberts, Penny, 216, 218 Robinson, Henry, 344, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 354, 355, 365 Rochester, Earl of, 312 Roermond (States Upper Gelderland), 62, 111, 122 Rohan conflicts, 220, 223 Rohdewald, Stefan, 442 Roman Catholics. See Catholics “Romans” (Wilno), 423–424, 425, 428, 435, 442 Rome, 84, 141, 162, 215, 380, 391, 421 Root and Branch petition (1640), 294 Rotenhan, Hans Sebastian von, 175–176 Rotterdam (Holland), 52 Rubys, Claude de, 258 Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor, 1576–1612), 82, 145, 375, 397, 404 Rueil, Treaty of (1635), 192, 202 Ruthenia, 372, 379–381, 442–443 Ruthenians (Wilno), 374, 417, 421–422, 423, 426, 430, 431, 433, 436 Rutherford, Samuel, 360, 362 A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience, 343 Sabbatarians, 379, 412–414 Sacheverell, Henry, 315 Sacramental Test (Ireland, 1704), 320 sacraments, 37–38, 401, 403, 413 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), 212, 213, 218, 229, 241, 244, 247, 258, 273, 284 Saint Germain (1570), Edict of, 216, 217, 247, 248, 249, 251, 255 St. Martin’s (Colmar), 182, 183, 184–185, 191, 195, 200, 202 St. Peter’s (Colmar), 181–182, 185, 195, 200 St. Vitus Cathedral (Prague), 372 Saint-Affrique (France), 241, 243, 247 Saint-Laurent-des-Arbres (France), 225, 245 Saint-Maixent (Poitou, France), 32–233, 234, 259
496
index
Salzburg, 152 Samosatenians, 409, 413. See also Unitarians Sandherr, Andreas Deklarationsschrift, 185–186, 187, 204 Sandherr, Niclaus, 190, 191, 193 Sandomierz Consensus (1570), 386 Sandomierz (Poland), 372 Sandys, Edwin, 382 Sattler, Michael, 41 Saumur (France), 227 Saxon visitation (1526), 140–141 Saxony, 150, 401, 406 Scherpenheuvel (Brabant), 63 Schilling, Anton, 7 Schilling, Heinz, 9, 10, 25 Schindling, Anton, 146–147 Schism Act (1714), 315 Schleitheim Confession (1527), 29, 33, 34, 35, 41 Schmidt, Johannes, 191, 192 Schott, Anton, 190, 191 schuilkerken (clandestine churches, Dutch Republic), 69–72, 100, 125 Schwabach Articles (1529), 30 Scotland, 293, 317. See also Presbyterians episcopacy in, 290, 313 multiconfessionalism in, 8, 289–290 religious freedom in, 306–307 repression and persecution in, 310 Scotland and England, Union of (1707), 313 Scots Confession (1560), 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 37–38 Sea Beggars (Dutch Republic), 103, 104 Second Helvetic Confession (1566, Heinrich Bullinger), 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 409 Seibt, Ferdinand Europa 1400: Die Krise des Spätmittelalters, 376 separatists (England), 295, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 348. See also Congregationalists; Independents Serinus, Christian, 185, 187 Sharp, James (Archbishop of St. Andrews), 310 Shaw, John, 303 shooting companies (Antwerp), 81, 86, 91 shrines (Low Countries), 63, 65, 71 Sibiu (Transylvania), 401 Sickingen, Franz von, 155, 164
Siegen (Holy Roman Empire), 150 Sigismund II Augustus (King of Poland, 1548–72), 375, 382, 389, 391 Sigismund the Old (King of Poland, 1506–48), 382, 384, 385, 387, 390 Silesia, Duchy of, 144 Simpson, John, 302–303 simultanea (sharing of sacred spaces) in Alsace, 202 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 59, 88, 121, 122 in England, 301–303 in Holy Roman Empire, 146, 150, 153, 205 in Transylvania, 406–407, 415 Six Articles (1543), 30, 34 Sixty-Seven Articles (1523), 24, 27, 30, 42 Sneek (Friesland), 53 social order (Ireland), 317, 327, 329, 330, 338, 339 Socinians, 314, 362, 409. See also Unitarians Solemn League and Convenant (England, 1644), 294, 306, 351 Sorbonne (Paris), 209, 210 South Holland, Reformed Synod of, 106 Southern, Richard, 2 Southwark (England), 301, 303 Spain, 292 peace with Dutch Republic, 105, 109, 116 toleration in, 347, 355 wars, 110–112, 114, 116, 124, 290, 350, 357 Spanish Inquisition, 76, 358 Spanish Netherlands (1549–1713), 62–68. See also Dutch Republic; Low Countries confessional coexistence in, 54–57 war with Dutch Republic, 48, 55 Speyer (Holy Roman Republic), 156, 174 Spicer, Andrew, 270, 271 Spiritual Virgins (Geestelijke Maagden), 71 Stancaro, Francesco, 409 States Brabant (Generality Lands), 57–58, 63–64, 66–67, 83, 85, 86, 88. See also Antwerp; Brabant States Flanders (Generality Lands), 57, 123 States Limburg (Generality Lands), 58–59
index States Upper Gelderland (Generality Lands), 59, 100, 119, 122–123, 124, 125. See also Gelderland States-General (Dutch Republic), 111, 113, 118, 119 States-General (Low Countries), 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 106, 108, 110 Steigerwald (Holy Roman Empire), 174–175 Stevensweert (States Upper Gelderland), 122 Stewart, Adam, 346 Stralen, Jan van, 86, 88 Strasbourg (Alsace), 185, 186, 190, 191, 196 Stubbe, Henry, 364 subcutaneous multiconfessional regimes (Holy Roman Empire), 142–143, 152, 179, 191, 204 “Submissions-Agnitions-Rezeβ” (1615), 171 Sully (Maximilien de Béthune), 233 Sunderland, Earl of, 312 Swabia, 144, 149, 155, 161, 172, 173, 174 Sweden, 176, 178, 190 rule of Colmar, 191, 192, 193, 200, 202, 203, 204 Swiss Confederation, 8–9, 114, 187, 188, 195, 198, 346, 356–357 synagogues, 84, 106, 125, 420, 422 Szeklers (Transylvania), 398, 413 Tallon, Alain, 215 Tambonneau, Jehan de, 248 Tatars, 374, 382, 419, 422, 431, 434, 440, 441, 442 taxation in Britain, 315, 324 in Colmar (Alsace), 184, 188–189, 191, 194, 195, 198, 201 in Transylvania, 403 Taylor, Jeremy, 348 temples (Huguenots), 219, 222, 230, 231, 236–237 Ten Commandments, 23 Test Act (Scotland, 1681), 310 Test Acts (England, 1673/1678), 309, 311, 319 Tetrapolitan Confession (1530), 27, 29, 32, 34 Teuschnitz (Holy Roman Empire), 169, 170
497
Thin, Floris, 108 Thirteen Articles (1538), 30, 34 Thirty Years’ War, 131, 138, 139, 160, 173, 176, 178, 189, 405 Thirty-Nine Articles of England (1563), 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 38–39, 42 Thompson, Humphrey, 339 Tielt (Flanders), 55, 56 toleration, 17–19, 65, 99–100, 341, 343. See also biconfessionalism; multiconfessionalism in Bohemia, 374–375 de facto by connivance, 96, 100, 104, 109, 144, 295 de jure, 100, 109, 122, 295 Declaratio Ferdinandea, 135, 136 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 47–48, 61–62, 69, 72, 95–96, 109, 122, 342–355, 356, 361–364, 365 in England, 285, 291, 297, 306, 309, 311, 313 tolerationists and antitolerationists, 342–359, 360–364 in France, 113, 214, 266, 343, 346, 348, 351, 356, 357, 358, 362, 365 in Holy Roman Empire, 144, 154, 346, 347, 357, 362 in Ireland, 310, 340 in Lithuania, 419, 439, 441 in Ottoman Empire, 346, 347 in Poland, 346, 347, 349, 351, 356, 358, 362, 375, 381, 442 in Spain, 347 in Swiss Confederation, 346, 356–357, 362 in Transylvania, 349 in Turkey, 362 Toleration Bill (1689), 313 Tomicki, Piotr (Bishop of Cracow), 387 Torgau Articles (1530), 30 Tories (England), 289, 309, 311, 314, 315 Toulon (France), 280 Toulouse, Parlement of, 227, 282–283 Tournai (Spanish Netherlands), 119 Tours (France), 255, 274, 280 Trakai (Troki, Lithuania), 382, 420 Transylvania, 15 coexistence in, 19, 401 doctrinal innovation in, 402, 403, 404, 412, 413 international position of, 416
498
index
Transylvania (cont.) invasion by Ottomans and Habsburgs, 397, 400 legal system, 400, 401, 402–403, 404, 408–409, 413 multiconfessionalism in, 375, 396, 399, 403, 405, 408, 415–416 “nations/received religions” of, 398, 399, 404, 413, 416 politics in, 14, 397, 398, 403, 404 public worship in, 407, 408, 416 repression and persecution in, 414 simultanea in, 406–407, 415 taxation in, 403 toleration in, 349 Trent, Council of, 33, 39, 41, 55, 137, 162, 163, 388, 390, 391 triconfessionalism, 130n4, 135, 146, 147, 153 Tridentine Profession of Faith (1564), 30, 42, 55, 97, 162 Trier, Archbishop of, 155, 156, 158 Trinity, 402, 409–410, 411 Troyes (France), 260, 276 Turda, Edict of (1568), 376 Turkey, 347, 362 Turks, 346, 357, 361, 370, 385 Twelve-Years Truce (1609–12), 57 Ubachs, P.J.H., 58, 89 Uden (Land of Ravenstein), 66, 125 Ulm (Holy Roman Empire)106, 443 Ulster (Ireland), 307, 310, 314, 322, 323, 324, 325, 333, 336, 337 plantation of, 318, 321, 331, 332 Uniates/Uniate Church in Ruthenia, 379–380, 442 in Wilno (Lithuania), 421–422, 423, 424, 430, 435, 436–437, 438, 441 Uniformity Acts (England, Ireland), 317 Unitarians/Unitarian Church in England, 306, 314 in Hungary, 371, 379 in Poland, 371, 379, 381, 382 in Transylvania, 375, 376, 394, 396, 398, 402, 403, 404, 405, 407, 409–415, 416 United Provinces. See Dutch Republic Upper Gelderland, States (Generality Lands), 59, 100, 119, 122–123, 124, 125. See also Gelderland Upper Lusatia, Margraviate of, 146 Urban VI, Pope, 376
Utraquists/Utraquist Church, 377, 378–379. See also Hussites in Bohemia, 371, 378, 395 in Poland, 382 Utrecht, Union of (1579), 92, 100, 108 Utrecht (city), 53, 65, 67, 68, 101, 108, 117, 350, 360 Utrecht (province), 51, 53, 67, 108, 118 Va’ad (Council of the Chief Communities, Wilno), 432 Vaals (States Limburg), 59n49, 121, 122 Valkenburg (States Limburg), 58, 120 Valkenisse, Maria Margaretha van, 62–63 Vane, Sir Henry, 344, 347 Vassy (France), 211 Venclova, Tomas, 374 Venlo (States Upper Gelderland), 111, 122, 123 Verhult, Adam, 90 Vernon, John, 354 verzuiling (pillarization), 60 Vieilleville, Marshal of, 248 Vienna, 145, 371, 377, 388 Vienna, Peace of (1660), 397 Vienne (France), 228, 261 Villars, Marquess of, 248 Villiers, Pierre Loyseleur de, 106 Vilnius. See Wilno Vio, Giacomo de, 6 Viole, Jacques, 258 violence, 3, 393. See also Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Britain, 315, 319, 337 in Dutch Republic/Low Countries/ Spanish Netherlands, 90, 91, 105, 108, 117, 121, 124 in France, 209, 211, 212–213, 218, 221–222, 229–231, 238 in Holy Roman Empire, 150, 152 in Lithuania, 439–440 in Transylvania, 406 Vitré (Brittanny, France), 222, 227 Voetius, Gisbertus, 361 Volkland, Frauke, 11–12 Voltaire, 341 On Toleration, 154 Vosmeer, Sasbout, 64, 68 Waldensian movement, 1, 2, 377 Wales, 305, 308 “walking out” (Auslaufen), 145, 441
index Wallonia (Spanish Netherlands), 89, 105, 110 Walsham, Alexandra, 341n2 Walwyn, William, 343, 344, 347, 353 A New Petition of the Papists, 356 Warmia (Poland), 388 wars, 3, 102, 393 Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54), 353 Anglo-French War (1627–29), 293, 295 Anglo-Spanish Wars (1585–1604/ 1625–30), 290, 292 Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), 59, 109, 110–112, 114, 116 English Civil War (1642–51), 289, 294 French Wars of Religion (1562–98), 212, 218, 228, 239, 240, 244, 250, 260, 265, 383 German Peasants War (1524–26), 383 Great Northern War (1700–21), 422n9 Irish Rebellion (1641–42), 320, 330, 331, 335 Nine Years’ War (1688–97), 150 Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), 131, 138, 139, 160, 173, 176, 189, 405 War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), 122 Warsaw Confederation, 375 Waterford (Ireland), 324, 336 Weber, Max, 19 Weesp (Holland), 53 Wesel (Holy Roman Republic), 64, 72, 141 Westminster Assembly, 295 Westminster Confession (1647), 28, 34, 42 Westphalia, Peace of (1648), 32, 119, 131, 147, 149, 150, 153, 154, 176, 192, 199, 203, 204 normative year (1624), 148, 152, 193 Westphalia (Holy Roman Empire), 162–163 Wetzlar (Holy Roman Empire), 146 Wexford (Ireland), 327, 336 White Mountain, Battle of (1620), 173 Whitehall Conference (1655), 360 Whitehall Debates (1648), 342, 353 Wied, Hermann von, 385 Wijk aan Zee (Holland), 53 William III (King of England), 289, 313 William of Orange (Prince of Orange, 1544–84), 13, 80, 81, 82, 90
499
and Accord of 2 September 1566, 77–79, 101, 104 Memorandum on the critical state of the Low Countries and the means to cure them (1566), 102 and Religious Peaces of 1578/1579, 83, 84, 87, 89, 92, 105–108, 109 supporting biconfessionalism, 100, 102–103, 124 Williams, George H., 4 Williams, Roger, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349–350, 352, 353, 365 The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy, 350–351 The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, 342 wills, 339, 436–438 Wilno (Vilnius, Lithuania), 15, 16, 17, 370, 374, 387, 392, 418ill. churches in, 421, 428, 429, 436, 437 coexistence in, 441 guilds, 424–429, 430 legal system, 423, 440–441 local government and politics, 14, 423–424 multiconfessionalism in, 417, 442 neighborhoods, 431–435, 438 public worship in, 421, 422, 441 toleration in, 419, 439, 441, 443 violence in, 439–440 Wingens, Marc, 62, 65 Wittenberg (Holy Roman Empire), 141, 377, 389 Władysław IV Waza (King of PolandLithuania, 1632–48), 430, 437 Władysław Jagiełło (King of Poland, 1386–1434), 372, 419n3 Woerden (Utrecht), 52, 66n75 Wolfgang Wilhelm (Count Palatine of Neuburg and Duke of Jülich/Berg), 171, 172 women, 62–63, 67–68 Wonderyear (1566–67), 76–81 Worms (Holy Roman Empire), 106, 156 worship, freedom of. See freedom of worship worship, places of. See also churches; simultanea in Britain, 299, 300, 301, 314 in France, 267, 271–279, 283, 284 in Lithuania, 441 in Transylvania, 406–407 Württemberg, 150, 180, 182, 185, 186 Würzburg, Hans Veit von, 168–169, 175
500 Würzburg, Prince-Bishopric of, 149, 156, 163, 167, 168, 172 Würzburg-family, 169, 170 Xanten, Treaty of (1614), 146 Ypres (Spanish Netherlands), 118 Zeeden, Ernst Walter, 4, 10 Die Entstehung der Konfessionen, 25 Zeeland (Dutch Republic), 50, 54, 81, 85, 89, 95, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109
index Zsigmond Báthory (Prince of Transylvania, 1581/86–98), 397, 403, 404 Zwingli, Huldrych, 385 Fidei ratio, 24 Sixty-Seven Articles, 24, 27, 30, 43 Zygmunt II August (King of PolandLithuania, 1548–72), 425 Zygmunt III Waza (King of PolandLithuania, 1587–1632), 420
