Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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Elizabeth. All foreign troops except 120 French were to leave
Scotland; Mary Stuart and Francis II relinquished claim to the English
crown; Mary was acknowledged Queen of Scotland, but she was never to
make war or peace without the consent of the Estates; these were to
name five of the twelve men in her privy council; no foreigner or
clergyman was to hold high office; and a general amnesty was to be
declared, with exceptions to be specified by the Estates. It was a
humiliating peace for the absent Queen, and a remarkable and almost
bloodless triumph for the Congregation.
The Parliament that met on August 1, 1560, accepted, with only eight
dissenting votes, a Confession of Faith drawn up by Knox and his aides
and softened in some clauses by Maitland of Lethington. As still the
official creed of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, some major
articles should be commemorated:
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I. We confess and acknowledge one only God... in three persons.
II. We confess and acknowledge this our God to have created man
(to wit, our first father Adam), of whom also God formed the woman
in His own image... so that in the whole nature of man could be
noted no imperfection. From which honor and perfection man and woman
did both fall, the woman being deceived by the serpent, and man
obeying to the voice of the woman....
III. By which transgression, commonly called Original Sin, was the
image of God utterly defiled in man; and he and his posterity of
nature became enemies to God, slaves to Satan, and servants to sin; in
samekill that death everlasting has had, and shall have, power and
dominion over all that has not been, are not, or shall not be
regenerate from above; which regeneration is wrought by the Holy
Ghost, working in the hearts of the elect of God an assured faith in
the promise of God... by which faith they apprehend Christ Jesus....
VIII. That same eternal God and Father... of mere mercy elected us
in Christ Jesus... before the foundation of the world....
XVI. We most earnestly believe that from the beginning there has
been, now is, and to the end of the world shall be, a Church, that
is to say, a company and multitude of men chosen by God, who rightly
worship and embrace Him by true faith in Christ Jesus... out of
which Church there is neither life nor eternal felicity. And therefore
we utterly abhor the blasphemy of those that affirm that men which
live accordingly to equity and justice shall be saved, what religion
soever they have professed....
XXI. ...We acknowledge... two chief sacraments only... Baptism and
the Supper.... Not that we imagine any transubstantiation of bread
into God's natural body... but, by the operation of the Holy
Ghost... we believe that the Faithful, in the right use of the
Lord's Table, so do eat the body, and drink the blood, of the Lord
Jesus....
XXIV. We confess and acknowledge empires, kingdoms, dominions, and
cities to be... ordained by God.... To kings, princes, and
magistrates... chiefly and most principally the conservation and
purgation of the Religion appertains; so that not only are they
appointed for civil policy, but also for maintenance of the true
Religion, and for suppressing of idolatry and superstition
whatsoever.... `062749
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Pursuant to this Confession the Scottish Reformation Parliament
repudiated the jurisdiction of the pope, made the Reformed creed and
ritual compulsory, and forbade celebration of the Mass on pain of
corporal punishment and confiscation of goods for the first offense,
exile for the second, death for the third. But as the nobles who
controlled the Parliament wanted land rather than blood, and did not
take the Calvinist theology literally, the persecution of those
Scots who still remained Catholic was kept comparatively mild, and
never came to corporal punishment. Now that the nobles were allowed to
reject purgatory as a myth, they claimed to have been cheated in
some part of their patrimony by ancestral donations of land or money
to pay priests to say Masses for the dead, who, on the new theology,
were irrevocably saved or damned before the creation of the world.
So the appropriation of ecclesiastical property could be pleasantly
phrased as the restoration of stolen goods. Most of the Scottish
monasteries were closed, and their wealth was taken by the nobles.
At first no provision was made by the government for the Calvinist
ministers; these had been used as ideological aides in the revolution,
but the nobles had now lost interest in theology.
Knox and his fellow preachers, who had risked and sacrificed so much
for the new order, had expected the property of the Church to be
applied to the support of the Kirk and its clergy. They petitioned
Parliament for such an arrangement; they received no reply, but were
finally allotted a sixth of the spoils. Finding this inadequate,
they turned against the grasping aristocracy, and began the historic
alliance of Scottish Presbyterianism with democracy.
Of all the Reformations, the Scottish shed the least blood, and
was the most permanent. The Catholics suffered silently; their bishops
fled; most parish priests accepted the change as no worse than
episcopal exactions and visitations. Rural districts lost their
wayside crosses, ancient shrines of pilgrimage were deserted, the
saints no longer provided easeful holydays. Many spirits must have
mourned and idealized the past, many must have waited hopefully for
the coming of their young queen from France. Much had been lost that
had been gay and beautiful, much that had been brutal and merciless
and insincere; much was to come that would be hard and dour. But the
change had to be. When the recriminations died down, and men
adjusted themselves to the new order, it would be a boon that some
likeness of faith joined with converging lines of royalty to end the
bitter wars between Scots and Englishmen. Soon the weaker nation would
give the stronger land a king, and Britain would be one.
CHAPTER XXVIII: The Migrations of Reform: 1517-60
I. THE SCANDINAVIAN SCENE: 1470-1523
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THE piety of the people had by 1500 made the Church the economic
master of Scandinavia. In Denmark half the soil was owned by the
Church, and was tilled by tenants verging on serfdom. `06281
Copenhagen itself was an ecclesiastical fief. Clergy and nobility were
exempt from land taxes: the nobles because they served at their own
expense in war, the clergy because they organized worship, morals,
education, and charity. The universities at Copenhagen and Uppsala
were of course in ecclesiastical hands. The Church required a tenth,
annually, of all nonecclesiastical produce or income; it exacted a
small fee for every building raised, every child born, every couple
married, every corpse interred; it claimed a day of gratis labor
from every peasant yearly; and no one could inherit property without
making a contribution to the Church as the probate court of
wills. `06282 These imposts were defended as financing the
ministrations of the Church, but complaints rose that too much of
the proceeds went to maintain bishops in regal splendor. The merchants
of Denmark, harassed by Hanseatic dominance in the North and Baltic
seas, chafed at the additional competition of nobles and clergy who
directly exported, often in their own ships, the surplus product of
their estates. In Scandinavia, as elsewhere, nobles hankered after
ecclesiastical lands. And there, as elsewhere, nationalism
conflicted with the supernational Church.
In all three countries the Church supported the Scandinavian Union
of Calmar, which Christian I of Denmark had renewed (1457). But in
Sweden a National party of burghers and peasants rejected the Union as
in effect a Danish supremacy, and proclaimed Sten Sture the Younger
regent of an independent nation (1512). Archbishop Gustav Trolle of
Uppsala- then the capital of Sweden- defended the Union; Sten Sture
the Younger deposed him; Pope Leo X ordered him reinstated; Sture
refused; Leo interdicted religious services in Sweden, and
commissioned Christian II of Denmark to invade Sweden and punish the
Regent. Christian's first attempt failed; he had to sign a truce;
but he carried back with him to Copenhagen (January 18, 1520)
several hostages as pledges for Swedish adherence to the truce; one of
these hostages was Gustavus Vasa. In a second expedition Christian won
a decisive victory, and Sture died of wounds received in battle. His
widow improvised an army, which held Stockholm for five months against
Danish siege; finally she surrendered on the promise, by Christian's
general, of a general amnesty. On November 4 Christian was crowned
King of Sweden by the restored and triumphant Trolle.
On November 7 the leading Swedes who had supported Sture were
summoned to the presence of the King in the citadel of Stockholm. A
representative of Trolle accused them of major crimes in having
deposed the Archbishop and having destroyed his castle, and he
called upon the King to revenge these wrongs. Despite the amnesty
seventy leading Swedes were condemned to death. On November 8 they
were beheaded in the Grand Square; on November 9 several others were
arrested and executed; some spectators who expressed sympathy were
added to the slaughter; and the property of the dead was confiscated
to the King. All Sweden cried out with horror. The Union of Calmar,
men said, was drowned in this "Stockholm Bath of Blood," and the
Church suffered severely in public esteem for having initiated the
massacre. Christian had thought to make his rule secure by
destroying the brains of the National party. In reality he had cleared
a way to the throne for the young hostage who was to make Sweden free.
His name was Gustavus Eriksson, but posterity called him also
Vasa, from the bundle (Swedish vasa, Latin fascis ) of sticks
that appeared in his family's coat of arms. At thirteen he was sent to
study at Uppsala; at twenty he was called to the court of Sture the
Younger, who had married a half-sister of Gustavus's mother; and there
he received further instruction from the prime minister, Bishop
Hemming Gad. In 1519 he escaped from surveillance in Denmark, made his
way to Lubeck, persuaded its senate (always hostile to Denmark) to
lend him money and a ship, and regained his native shores (May 31,
1520). For months he wandered in disguise, or hid in obscure villages.
In November news reached him that nearly a hundred Swedish patriots,
including his father, had been slaughtered in Stockholm. He mounted
the swiftest horse he could find, and rode north to his own province
of Dalecarlia, resolved to organize there, from the hardy yeomanry,
the beginnings of an army that might free Sweden from the Danes.
His life was now an epic worthy of Homeric song. Traveling icy
roads, he sought rest at the home of a former schoolmate. This
friend gave him every hospitality, and then went off to notify the
pro-Danish police that the escaped hostage could now be caught; but
the wife warned Gustavus to flee. Riding onward twenty miles, he found
asylum with a priest, who hid him for a week. Moving thirty miles
farther, he tried to rouse the town of Rattvik to revolt; but its
people had not yet heard, and would not believe, the story of the Bath
of Blood. Vasa rode over frozen meadows twenty-five miles north to
Mora, and again pleaded for a revolutionary uprising, but the peasants
listened in skeptical apathy. Friendless and for a moment hopeless,
Gustavus turned his horse to the west, resigned to seeking asylum in
Norway. Before he reached the frontier a messenger from Mora
overtook him, and begged him to come back, pledging that now he
would be heard with a spirit as hot as his own. The peasants had at
last heard of the horror in Stockholm; moreover, it was rumored that
the King was planning to journey through Sweden, and had ordered
gallows to be set up in every major town. New taxes were to be imposed
upon a people already struggling for life against the greed of masters
and the tyranny of the elements. When Gustavus spoke again to the
citizens of Mora they gave him a bodyguard of sixteen highlanders, and
vowed to arm themselves, discipline themselves, and follow wherever he
led them against the Danes.
They knew no weapons yet but bows and arrows and axes. Vasa taught
them to make javelins and pikes with iron heads. He trained them
with all the ardor of a youth inspired by love of country and power.
So inspired, they captured Vesteres, then Uppsala; once more
Archbishop Trolle fled. Patiently, resolutely, the growing army won
province after province from the Danish garrisons. Christian II
could not come to lead his forces in person, for in his own country he
was confronted by civil strife, but his navy repeatedly raided Swedish
shores. Gustavus dispatched emissaries to Lubeck to ask for ships of
war. For a large promised sum the merchant city equipped ten
vessels, which diverted the energies of the Danish fleet. On June 7,
1523, the victorious revolutionaries, in a new Riksraad, named their
leader King Gustavus I; on June 20 Stockholm surrendered to him, and
thereafter Vasa made it his capital. Meanwhile Christian II had been
deposed in Denmark, and Frederick I, his successor, renounced all
Danish claims to sovereignty over Sweden. The Union of Calmar
(1397-1523) came to an end; the Vasa dynasty began.
II. THE SWEDISH REFORMATION
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Gustavus was still a youth of twenty-seven. He was not as tall as we
expect men of the north to be, but he had a Viking's vigor of body,
his round face was ruddy with health, and his long yellow beard gave
him a dignity befitting his royalty rather than his age. His morals
were excellent for a king, and even the Church that he was soon to
reject could not impugn his piety. He devoted himself to the tasks
of government with an impatient energy that sometimes slipped into
violence or tyranny, but the condition of Sweden at his accession
almost justified his temper and autocracy. In the chaos of war
thousands of peasants had left their farms unsown, miners had
abandoned their pits, the cities were devastated with conflict, the
currency was debased, the national treasury was bankrupt, the
executive brains of the country had been spilled out in the "Bath."
The surviving feudal barons considered Gustavus an upstart, and looked
down their noses at his assumption of power. Conspiracies were
formed to depose him; he put them down with a strong arm. Finland,
which had been part of Sweden, was still in Danish hands, and Soren
Norby, the Danish admiral, held the strategic island of Gotland.
Lubeck clamored for the repayment of its loans.
The first need of a government is money paid, or promised, to the
armed forces that protect it, then to the officials that administer
it. But in Vasa's Sweden taxes cost almost as much to collect as
they brought in, for those who alone could pay them were strong enough
to resist. Gustavus stooped to the desperate expediency of again
debasing the coinage, but the bad coins soon fell to their actual
value, and the state's finances were worse than before. Only one group
in Sweden was still rich- the clergy. Gustavus turned to them for aid,
thinking it just that the wealth of the Church should alleviate the
poverty of the people and the government. In 1523 he wrote to Bishop
Hans Brask of Linkoping for a donation of 5,000 guilders to the state.
The Bishop protested and yielded. To the churches and monasteries of
Sweden Vasa sent an urgent request that all money and precious metal
not indispensable to the continuance of their services should be
remitted to the government as a loan; and he published a list of the
amounts he expected from each source. The response was not what he had
hoped for, and he began to wonder whether it would not be wise to do
as the Lutheran princes of Germany were doing- confiscate the wealth
of the Church to the needs of the state. He had not forgotten that
most of the higher clergy had opposed the revolution, and had
buttressed the rule of Christian II in Sweden.
In 1519 Olaus Petri, son of a Swedish ironmaster, returned from
several years of study in Wittenberg. As deacon of the cathedral
school at Strangnars he permitted himself some heresies- that
purgatory was a myth, that prayers should be addressed, and confession
should be made, only to God, and that the preaching of the Gospel
was better than the ritual of the Mass. The writings of Luther began
to circulate in Sweden. Brask importuned Vasa to forbid their sale;
the King replied that "Luther's teachings have not been found by
impartial judges to be false." `06283 Perhaps he thought it politic to
keep a heretic in reserve as a bargaining point with the Church.
Matters grew livelier when Pope Adrian VI refused to confirm his own
legate, Johannes Magnus, as Archbishop of Uppsala, and proposed to
restore Gustav Trolle, enemy of the revolution. Vasa sent to the Curia
a letter that would then (1523) have shocked, and would later have
delighted, Henry VIII:
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If our Most Holy Father has any care for the peace of our country,
we shall be pleased to have him confirm the election of his
legate... and we shall comply with the Pope's wishes as to a
reformation of the Church and religion. But if His Holiness, against
our honor and the peace of our subjects, sides with the
crime-stained partisans of Archbishop Trolle, we shall allow his
legate to return to Rome, and shall govern the Church in this
country with the authority which we have as king.
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Adrian's death, and the absorption of Clement VII with Luther,
Charles V, and Francis I left Vasa free to advance the Swedish
Reformation. He appointed Olaus Petri to the church of St. Nicholas at
Stockholm; he made Olaus's brother Laurentius professor of theology at
Uppsala, and raised a third reformer, Laurentius Andreae, to be
archdeacon of the cathedral. In the chapter house of the cathedral,
under the presidency of the King, Olaus Petri defended Lutheranism
in debate with Peter Galle (December 27, 1524). Vasa judged Olaus
victor, and was not disturbed when Olaus, four months before
Luther's marriage, took a wife (1525). Bishop Brask, however, was
shocked by this violation of clerical celibacy, and demanded that
the King should place Petri under the ban. Gustavus replied that Olaus
should be punished if he had done wrong, but "it would seem surprising
if that should be the effect of marriage (a ceremony not forbidden
by God), and yet for debauchery, and other sins that are forbidden,
one should not fall under the ban." `06284 Instead of outlawing
Petri he commissioned him and his brother to translate the Bible
into Swedish. As in many other countries the vernacular version helped
to form the national language, and to transform the national religion.
Gustavus, like most rulers, considered any measure moral that
strengthened his country or his throne. He saw to it that bishops
pliable to his plans should be promoted to Swedish sees. He found
irresistible reasons for appropriating, gradatim, monastic lands;
and as he shared the spoils with the nobles, he explained that he
was merely returning to laymen what their ancestors had been
wheedled into giving to the Church. Pope Clement VII complained that
Swedish priests married, gave communion in bread and wine, neglected
the sacrament of extreme unction, and altered the ritual of the
Mass; and he appealed to the King to remain faithful to the Church.
But Gustavus had gone too far to come back; orthodoxy would have
ruined his treasury. At the Diet of Vesteres (1527) he openly declared
for the Reformation.
It was an historic meeting in both its constitution and its results.
Four bishops, four canons, fifteen members of the Riksraad, 129
nobles, thirty-two burgesses, fourteen deputies of the miners, 104
representatives of the peasantry- this was one of the broadest-based
national assemblies of the sixteenth century. The King's chancellor
laid a revolutionary proposal before the Diet: the state, he said, was
so impoverished that it could not function for the good of the people;
the Swedish Church was so rich that it could transfer much of its
wealth to the government and yet have enough left to fulfill all its
tasks. Bishop Brask, fighting to the last for his own ideals and
realty, declared that the Pope had commanded the clergy to defend
their property. The Diet voted in favor of obeying the Pope. Gustavus,
staking everything on one throw, announced that if this was the
sentiment of the Diet and the nation he would resign and leave Sweden.
For three days the assembly debated. The burghers and the deputies
of the peasants came over to the side of the King; the nobles had good
cause for moving in the same direction; finally the Diet, convinced
that Vasa was more valuable to Sweden than any pope, agreed to the
royal wishes. In the Recess or conclusions of Vesteres the monasteries
were made fiefs of the King, though the monks were allowed to use
them; all property granted by nobles to the Church since 1454 was to
be returned to the donors' heirs; the bishops were to surrender
their castles to the Crown; no bishop was to seek papal
confirmation; the clergy were to yield to the state all income not
needed for their services; auricular confession was ended, and all
sermons were to be based exclusively on the Bible. In Sweden, even
more decisively than elsewhere, the Reformation was the
nationalization of religion, the triumph of the state over the Church.
Vasa survived this crisis for thirty-three years, and remained to
the end a forceful but beneficent autocrat. He was convinced that only
a centralized authority could reorganize Sweden into order and
prosperity, that in so complex a task he could not stop at every
step to consult a deliberative assembly. Under his encouragement and
regulation the mines of the north poured their iron into the sinews of
Sweden; industry expanded; commercial treaties with England, France,
Denmark, and Russia found markets for Swedish goods, brought into
Sweden the products of a dozen lands, and gave new refinement and
confidence to a civilization that before him had been arrested in
rural and illiterate simplicity. Sweden flourished now as never
before.
Gustavus engaged in several wars, suppressed four rebellions, and
took in succession three wives. The first bore him the future Eric
XIV; the second gave him five sons and five daughters; the third,
who was sixteen when he, fifty-six, married her, outlived him by sixty
years. He induced the Rigsraad to accept his sons as heirs to the
throne, and to establish hereditary succession in the male line as a
rule for Swedish royalty. Sweden forgave his dictatorship, because
it understood that order is the parent, not the child, of liberty.
When he died (September 29, 1560), after a reign of thirty-seven
years, he was buried in Uppsala Cathedral with fond and lavish
ceremony. He had not given his people the personal freedom for which
they seem so peculiarly fitted, but he had given them collective
freedom from foreign domination in religion or government; and he
had created the conditions under which his nation could mature in
economy, literature, and art. He was the father of modern Sweden.
III. THE DANISH REFORMATION
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