Fields of Blood (48 page)

On October 25, 1534, Calvinists had pasted vitriolic and satirical posters attacking the Catholic Mass on public landmarks all over Paris,
Blois,
Orléans, and
Tours. One even appeared on the door of
Francis I’s bedchamber. As Catholics made their way to morning Mass, they were confronted by a headline printed in capital letters: “TRUE ARTICLES ON THE
HORRIBLE, GROSS AND INSUFFERABLE ABUSE OF THE PAPAL MASS.” The French pamphleteer
Antoine Marcourt listed four arguments against the
Eucharist, “by which the whole world … will be completely ruined, cast down, lost and desolated”: it was blasphemous for the Mass to claim that it repeated Christ’s perfect sacrifice on Calvary;
Jesus’s body was with God in Heaven so could not be present in the bread and wine; transubstantiation had no scriptural warrant; and communion was simply an act of remembrance. The diatribe concluded with a vicious attack on the clergy:

The polemic was so extreme that even
Theodore Beza, Calvin’s future deputy in Geneva, condemned it in his history of the French Protestant Church. Yet it was this disreputable attack that sparked the French Wars of Religion.

As soon as the king saw the placards, he initiated a nationwide persecution of the Huguenots that forced many, including Calvin himself, to flee the country. King Francis was not a theological bigot; he was open to new ideas and had entertained Erasmus and other
humanists at his court. But he rightly saw the placards not simply as a theological denunciation but also as an assault on the entire political system. The Eucharist was the supreme expression of social bonding, experienced not principally as a private communion with Christ but as a rite that bound the community together,
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a ritual of “greeting, sharing, giving, receiving, and making peace.”
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Before receiving the sacrament, Catholics had to beg their neighbors’ pardon for outstanding grievances; king, priests, aristocrats, and the common folk all ate the same consecrated bread and in so doing were integrated as one in the Body of Christ. The placards were also understood by both Catholics and Protestants as an implicit critique of the
monarchy. The kings of France had always been revered as semidivine; the Calvinists’ denial of the real presence of Christ now tacitly denied the fusion of the physical and the sacred that had been crucial to medieval Christianity and that the king embodied in his person.
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Pasting
the scurrilous placard on
Francis’s door was both a religious and a political act; and for Francis, the two were inseparable.

Yet during the ensuing wars, it was impossible to divide the French population into neat communities of Protestants and Catholics.
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Here too people crossed the confessional lines and even changed their religious allegiance.
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In 1574 Henry of
Montmorency, Catholic governor of
Lan
guedoc, joined his Huguenot neighbors in supporting a constitution attacking the monarchy.
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In 1579 a significant number of Huguenots were prepared to fight the king under the banner of the ultra-Catholic Duke of Guise, a pretender to the throne.
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Even the Catholic kings made alliances with Protestants in their struggle against the
Habsburgs, whom the
Peace of Augsburg had set back but hardly neutralized.
Charles IX (r. 1560–74) fought with the Huguenots against the Spanish Habsburgs in the
Netherlands, and in 1580
Henry III (r. 1575–89) was prepared to support Dutch Calvinists against Catholic
Spain.

In their struggle against the aristocracy, the lower classes also transcended sectarian allegiance. In 1562 hundreds of Catholic peasants joined a revolt against a Catholic nobleman who had forbidden his Huguenot peasants to hold Protestant services.
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Catholic and Protestant peasants joined forces again to oppose Henry III’s excessive tax levy in 1578, rampaging through the countryside for almost a year until they were slaughtered by the royal troops. In another tax protest during the 1590s, twenty-four Protestant and Catholic villages in the
Haut-Biterrois set up an alternative system of self-government,
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and in the southwest Protestants and Catholics engaged in dozens of joint uprisings against the nobility, some of which involved as many as forty thousand people. In Croquants, the most famous of these associations, ignoring religious difference was a condition of membership.
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After the murder of Henry III in 1589, the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre succeeded to the throne as
Henry IV and brought the French Wars of Religion to an end by converting to Catholicism and adopting a policy of strict neutrality. In the
Edict of Nantes (1598), he granted religious and civil liberties to the Huguenots, and when the
parlement
expelled the
Jesuits from France, he had them reinstated. This did not mark the birth of the tolerant secular state, however, since Henry had not abandoned the ideal of
une foi;
the Edict of Nantes was simply a temporary settlement, an attempt to buy time by winning the Huguenots over.
The French crown was still too weak to achieve the religious uniformity that, the kings believed, would help to centralize the state and bind the nation together.
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Despite Henry’s policy of toleration, though, Europe drifted inexorably toward the horror of the
Thirty Years’ War, which would kill about 35 percent of the population of central Europe. Here again, though religious solidarities were certainly a factor in this series of conflicts, it was never their sole motivation.
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This was already clear in 1609, nine years before the war began, when the Calvinist
Frederick V, elector palatine, tried to create a pan-European Union of Protestant principalities against the Habsburgs. Very few of the Protestant princes joined, but the union did gain Catholic support from Henry IV and Carlo Emmanuele of Savoy. The war started in earnest with an uprising in Catholic Bohemia against the Catholic Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II: in 1618 the rebels defiantly offered the crown of Bohemia to the Calvinist Frederick V, but the other members of the Protestant Union refused to support him, and two years later the union disbanded.
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It took two years for the Habsburgs to quash the revolt and re-Catholicize Bohemia, and meanwhile the Dutch had opened a new round of hostilities against Habsburg rule.

The princes of Europe resisted Habsburg
imperialism, but there was rarely a wholly solid “Catholic” or “Protestant” response. Catholic France nearly always supported the Protestant princes of
Germany against the empire. The war was fought by
mercenaries available to the highest bidder, so Protestants from
Scotland and
England, for example, served in the armies of Catholic France.
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The Catholic general
Ernst von Mansfeld led the imperial army against the Catholic Bohemian rebels at the start of the war but in 1621 switched sides and commanded the troops of the Calvinist Frederick V in Bohemia.
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Albrecht von Wallenstein, the Bohemian mercenary leader who became the supreme commander of the Catholic imperial army, was a
Lutheran, and many of his foot soldiers were Protestants who had fled Catholic persecution in their own countries. Wallenstein seemed more interested in military entrepreneurism than religion.
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He transformed his huge estates into a vast arsenal for his private army of half a million men. Indifferent to the social standing or religious convictions of his associates, he demanded only obedience and efficiency from his troops, who were allowed to live off the countryside and terrorize the rural population.

By 1629 Emperor Ferdinand seemed to have regained control of the
empire. However, a year later the tide turned, when Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of France, persuaded the Protestant warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus of
Sweden to invade the Habsburg Empire. Adolphus is often presented as the hero of the Protestant cause, but he did not mention religion in his declaration of intent in June 1630 and found it difficult at first to attract allies.
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The most powerful German Protestant princes saw the Swedish invasion as a threat and formed a third party, holding aloof from both the Swedes and the Habsburgs. When Lutheran German peasants tried to drive the Lutheran Swedes out of their country in November 1632, they were simply massacred.
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Eventually, however, after Adolphus’s first victory over the Catholic League of German princes at Magdeburg in 1631, many territories that had tried to remain neutral joined the Swedish offensive. Inadequate methods of financing, supplying, and controlling the troops meant that Swedish soldiers resorted to looting the countryside, killing huge numbers of civilians.
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The mass casualties of the Thirty Years’ War can partly be attributed to the use of
mercenary armies who had to provision themselves and could only do so by brutally sacking civilian populations, abusing women and children, and slaughtering their prisoners.

Catholic France had come to the rescue of the Protestant Swedes in January 1631, promising to supply their campaign, and later dispatched troops to fight the imperial forces in the winter of 1634–35. They received the backing of Pope
Urban VIII, who wanted to weaken Habsburg control of the Papal States in
Italy. To counter the combined Swedish, French, and papal alliance, the Protestant principalities of
Brandenburg and
Saxony were reconciled with the Catholic emperor at the
Peace of Prague (1635), and within a few months most of the Lutheran states also made peace with Ferdinand. The Protestant armies were absorbed into the imperial forces, and German Catholics and Protestants fought together against the Swedes. The rest of the Thirty Years’ War now became largely a struggle between Catholic France and the Catholic Habsburgs. Neither could achieve a decisive victory, and after a long, enervating struggle, treaties were signed, known collectively as the
Peace of Westphalia (1648), which left the Austrian Habsburgs in control of their hereditary lands and the Swedes in possession of
Pomerania,
Bremen, and the
Baltic region.
Prussia emerged as the leading German Protestant state, and France gained much of the
Alsace. Finally Calvinism became a licit religion in the
Holy Roman Empire.
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By the end of the
Thirty Years’ War, Europeans had fought off the danger of imperial rule. There would never be a large unified empire on the Persian,
Roman, or Ottoman model; instead, Europe would be divided into smaller states, each claiming sovereign power in its own territory, each supported by a standing, professional army and governed by a prince who aspired to
absolute rule—a recipe, perhaps, for chronic interstate warfare.

“Religious” sentiments were certainly present in the minds of those who fought these wars, but to imagine that “religion” was yet distinguishable from the social, economic, and political issues is essentially anachronistic. As the historian
John Bossy has reminded us, before 1700 there was no concept of “religion” as separate from society or politics. As we shall see later in this chapter, that distinction would not be made until the formal
separation of church and state by early modern philosophers and statesmen, and even then the liberal state was slow to arrive. Before that time, “there simply was no coherent way yet to divide religious causes from social causes; the divide is a modern invention.”
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People were fighting for different visions of society, but they had as yet no way to separate religious from temporal factors.

This was also true of the English Civil War (1642–48), which resulted in the execution of
Charles I and the creation in
England of a short-lived Puritan republic under
Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658). It is more difficult to list examples of participants in this war crossing denominational lines, since Cromwell’s Puritan army and the royalist troops were all members of the
Church of England. They held different views of their faith, however. The “
Puritans” were dissatisfied with the slow and limited progress of the
Reformation in their country and wanted to “purge” the Anglican establishment of “popish” practices. Instead of worshipping in elaborate church buildings with authoritarian bishops, they formed small, exclusive congregations of those who had experienced a “born-again” conversion. Certainly the heavy-handed attempts of William
Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (1573–1645), to root out Calvinism in the English and
Scottish churches, his suspension of Puritan ministers, and his support of royal absolutism were crucial irritants. Cromwell was convinced that God controlled events on earth and had singled out the English to be his new chosen people.
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The success of his New Model Army in defeating the royalists at the
Battle of Naseby in 1645 seemed to prove the “remarkable providences and appearances
of the Lord,” and he justified his brutal subjugation of
Ireland as a “righteous judgment of God.”
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But the civil war is no longer regarded as a last eruption of religious bigotry laid to rest by
Charles II’s constitutional
monarchy in 1660.
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It too was part of the larger European struggle against state centralization. Charles I had been trying to achieve an
absolute monarchy similar to those established on the continent after the Thirty Years’ War, and the civil war was an attempt to resist this centralization and protect local interests, freedoms, and privileges. Again, transcending sectarian divisions, Scottish
Presbyterians and Irish Catholics had for a time fought alongside the Puritans to weaken the monarchy. Even though Charles had tried to impose episcopal rule on the Scots, they made it clear in their
Proclamation of 1639 that they were fighting not only for religion but also “to shake off all monarchical government.” In the
Grand Remonstrance, presented to Charles in 1641, the Puritans took it for granted that religion and politics were inseparable: “The root of all this mischief we find to be a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government upon which the religion and justice of this kingdom are firmly established.”
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