A Criminal History of Mankind (59 page)

Things came to a head in south Germany in 1525, when the peasants revolted, plundering castles and cloisters. They wanted their share of the immense wealth they imagined to be in the hands of the Church and the aristocracy. Contemporary pictures show them guzzling wine and eating the monastery’s trout and chickens. An evangelist named Thomas Muntzer, who believed himself to be the new Daniel, led one group from Mulhausen. Nearly six thousand of them were surrounded by a professional army and massacred. The peasants had appealed to Luther, but he was horrified to hear his name used as an excuse for pillage and murder; he wrote a pamphlet ‘Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants’, in which he advised the princes to ‘smite, slay and stab’. At the time he wrote it, the bloodshed had not started; by the time it appeared, mobs of peasants were being wiped out all over Germany. The peasants cursed Luther as a traitor to their cause.

Yet Luther’s opposition to the peasants was a guarantee of the survival of his Church. If he had lent his name to the revolt, the nobles would have set out to destroy Protestantism. As it was, they regarded him as an ally. In 1526, the Diet passed a law saying that each German state could make up its own mind whether to be Protestant or Catholic. Three years later, Charles V tried to force them to change their minds, but it was too late. Protestantism was now ‘legal’ in Germany. Luther’s part in the drama was now played. He married a nun who had escaped from a convent, had six children and died at the age of sixty-three, nearly thirty years after he had accidentally started a revolution by nailing up his ninety-five theses.

During those early years of the Lutheran revolution, no one seemed a more unlikely candidate for conversion to Protestantism than England’s Henry VIII. To begin with, he was not even remotely interested in religion. Henry liked to regard himself as a kind of ideal Renaissance man: a fine athlete and horseman, a good shot with a bow, a skilful tennis player and a very passable poet and composer - his courtiers naturally assured him that he was equal to the best. He was interested in theology in an amateurish kind of way, largely because friends like Sir Thomas More encouraged him to believe that he was a profound thinker. (It was More who wrote most of the book against Luther that led the pope to call Henry ‘Defender of the Faith’.) In short, his character had certain distinct affinities with that of Nero. He was also as spendthrift as Leo X. During the course of his life he wasted his subjects’ money building twenty or thirty palaces and vast ships that would not sail. When he had squeezed all the money he could get by way of taxes, he debased the coinage so that inflation rose steadily during his reign - by the time his daughter Elizabeth came to the throne prices had risen by four hundred per cent.

He began his career as king - at the age of twenty - with a truly Machiavellian stroke. His father’s chief tax collector was John Dudley, a conscientious civil servant who was, naturally, much hated by the people. Henry achieved easy popularity by having him arrested and executed on a trumped-up charge.

His troubles with the pope began six years after he had been acclaimed Defender of the Faith. Henry was married to Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain who had sent Columbus to America; diplomatically, it was an excellent match. But Catherine provided her husband with no male heir. Henry had frequent affairs with ladies of the court, and Catherine pretended not to notice; but when, in 1526, he met the nineteen-year-old Anne Boleyn, he had begun to think it was time to look for another wife. He asked his lord chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, to approach the new pope, Clement VII, about a divorce.

Clement - the former Giulio de Medici - was not a man to make up his mind quickly. Besides, he had other problems on his mind. He was tired of the Emperor Charles V marching his troops through Italy whenever he felt inclined, even though Charles could point to a treaty with Leo X to justify it. Besides, the Vatican was expected to disgorge money for the emperor’s soldiers, and the pope felt this was totally against the laws of nature. Encouraged by the French king, Francis I, he declined to pay any more and created an alliance of Italian cities to fight the Spaniards. It was a tragic mistake. Francis I failed to send the army he had promised. Charles V had no money to pay a good professional army and had to raise an army of ruffians with promises of plunder. Too late, Clement tried to buy them off. On 6 May 1527, the mercenaries threw scaling ladders against the walls of Rome and burst into the city. The result was the most horrifying sack of Rome so far - worse by far than that of Alaric. It was simply murder, rape and torture, and it went on for months. They killed pointlessly, without reason. They were determined to get paid if it involved dismantling every house in Rome and torturing every man and woman to force them to give up their hidden treasures. As far as Rome was concerned, it was the end of the Renaissance. In fact, it was very nearly the end of Rome. And this violence was not the fault of Charles V - who tried hard to stop it - or the vacillating pope. The blame must be laid squarely at the door of Martin Luther. Most of these mercenaries were Lutherans who were delighted to try to destroy the ‘eternal city’. They regarded it as a duty as well as a pleasure to rape nuns, to throw priceless statues into cesspools, to slash religious paintings, to stable their horses in St Peter’s. For these Catholics were robbers and plunderers and deceivers; they deserved to be exterminated. The sack of Rome of 1527 was an expression of the new religious spirit of the north.

It also explains why Charles V - a good Catholic - should have developed a particularly virulent loathing for Protestants; as the ‘second Charlemagne’, he itched for the opportunity to repay them in kind.

Charles also had something to say about the divorce of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was his aunt; her only daughter Mary - who would become queen of England - his cousin. He brought pressure to bear on the pope - who would have been perfectly willing to grant Henry his divorce. Clement vacillated. Francis I sent his armies into Italy and won victories; Clement now felt independent enough to send an envoy to England to try the case. Then, in 1529, Charles beat the French army at Landriano and the war ended in a treaty that was humiliating for France. Henry put the blame on Wolsey - he was the kind of man who had to have someone to blame - and the cardinal only escaped execution by dying of illness. Then the king secretly married Anne Boleyn - who was withholding her sexual favours pending wedlock - and a new Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer, declared that Henry was now divorced from Catherine of Aragon.

In 1530, the king suddenly realised that this quarrel with Rome could be highly profitable. Using the same trumped-up treason charge that he had used against Wolsey - that of recognising the pope’s authority above the king’s - he blackmailed Canterbury into paying £100,000 and York into paying £19,000. Then, like a tiger who has tasted blood, he surveyed the abbeys and monasteries of England, computed their wealth and ordered his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, to squeeze them dry. Glastonbury Abbey was a typical example. Its abbot, Richard Whyting, had entertained Henry magnificently, which was a mistake. In 1539, Whyting was accused of treason, sentenced to death by Cromwell and hanged on Glastonbury Tor. The beautiful abbey building - whose grounds had held the body of King Arthur - was then reduced to a ruin.

Henry went on to marry four more times. When Anne Boleyn presented him with a daughter (later Queen Elizabeth I) and then a stillborn son, she was beheaded on an accusation of adultery. Jane Seymour, the next wife, died after giving birth to a son, Edward. Henry was pushed into marrying the unattractive Anne of Cleves for political reasons by Cromwell - who paid for the mistake by his own downfall and execution. When Charles V and Francis I made the marriage unnecessary by starting to quarrel again, Anne was quickly divorced. Meanwhile, Henry had fallen in love with a sexually desirable teenager named Catherine Howard - he was unaware that she had already had several lovers, including her two cousins Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpepper. After marrying Henry in 1541, she appointed Dereham her secretary and had several clandestine meetings with Culpepper - although it was never proved that she committed adultery with either. Denounced by Cranmer, she was executed on the same spot as Anne Boleyn. Henry married his last wife, Catherine Parr, in 1543, and was considering having her executed for contradicting him when he died himself at the age of fifty-five.

In his final years, Martin Luther experienced pangs of doubt about the revolution he had fathered - not because he regretted the break with the Catholics (his hatred of popery was almost paranoid), but because of the bloodshed it had already caused. In July 1523, two Augustinian monks were burnt at Brussels, the first victims of the Reformation. But large-scale problems were incubating in Zurich, where the Protestant opinions of a young Swiss pastor, Ulrich Zwingli, had already persuaded the town council to support him. Zwingli - who had arrived at his views quite independently from Luther - was altogether less emotional than the German reformer. Some of his followers felt that he was too reasonable, too inclined to seek a compromise with authority, and they formed into a communistic movement that believed that men should be baptised a second time - hence their name, Anabaptists. For some reason, they aroused a rage and detestation out of all proportion to their harmfulness. Even the American historian John Lothrop Motley, writing
The Rise of the Dutch Republic
in the mid-nineteenth century, lost his temper when talking about them, and wrote: ‘The leaders were among the most depraved of human creatures, as much distinguished for licentiousness, blasphemy, and cruelty as their followers for grovelling superstition. The evil spirit driven out of Luther seemed, in orthodox eyes, to have taken possession of a herd of swine...’ (Everyman edition, Vol. 1, p. 79). In fact, the Anabaptists simply believed in accepting the New Testament as a literal guide to living - in many ways they resembled the Cathar heretics of two centuries earlier. A mass ‘second baptism’ that took place outside Zurich in 1525 led the town council to ban them and pass sentence of death on any who were caught. After that, the Anabaptists were driven out of city after city. Thomas Miintzer, one of the leaders of the peasants’ revolt, was an Anabaptist. After the revolt had been put down, the Anabaptists continued to look for a city where they could put their principles into action. In 1532, they look over Miinster, in Westphalia, and, according to Motley, ‘confiscated property, plundered churches, violated females, murdered men who refused to join the gang, and... practised all enormities...’ Their prophet John Boccold, known as John of Leyden, preached polygamy and married fourteen wives. In 1535, the Bishop of Miinster besieged the city, which held out until its inhabitants were forced to practise cannibalism, then surrendered. The bishop then had the Anabaptist leaders tortured horribly, and hung in cages from a church tower. In Amsterdam, a mixed crowd of men and women who ran naked through the streets claiming to represent ‘the naked truth’ were all executed.

In Brussels in 1535, an imperial edict was issued ‘condemning all heretics to death’. And so, more than ten years before Luther’s death, the slaughter began. Catholics murdered Protestants; Protestants murdered Catholics; and both of them murdered Anabaptists. Since Charles V was perhaps the most powerful monarch in Europe, the Protestants would undoubtedly have suffered some serious reverses had it not been for the non-stop quarrel that raged between Charles V and Francis I. They went on fighting war after war, mostly about territorial claims in Italy and Burgundy. It was not until 1544 that they concluded their fourth major war with the Treaty of Crespy and Charles could turn his mind to his long-cherished dream of smashing the Protestants once and for all. Besides, the Catholic Church was no longer quite so indefensible. In 1534, a young Spaniard named Ignatius Loyola had founded the Order of Jesus - or the Jesuits - whose purpose was to reform the Church from the inside. He was successful beyond everyone’s wildest hopes; Jesuit missionaries and Jesuit schools carried Catholicism from China to America. If Loyola had started his movement twenty years earlier, Protestantism would probably have been nipped in the bud. And at the Council of Trent the Church showed its determination to reform itself by remaining in session for eighteen years.

So by the year of Luther’s death, 1546, Charles V felt ready to complete the Counter-Reformation by killing every Protestant in Europe. He had had a great deal of practice in suppressing revolts. He was the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, who had brought unity to Spain. Unfortunately, when they had driven the Moors out of Granada, they had also founded the Spanish Inquisition to make sure that everybody in Spain - including Moors and Jews - became good Christians; the name of their chief inquisitor, Torquemada, became a by-word for cruelty. Charles inherited the bigoted Catholicism of his grandmother, and approved of her notion of burning heretics. When he came to Spain from Ghent at the age of seventeen (in 1517) he could not even speak Spanish and soon had a widespread revolt on his hands. Luck was with him; the rebellion turned into a kind of peasants’ revolt - they even called themselves ‘comuneros’ - and the nobles who had supported it went over to Charles’s side. So in 1521 there was a mass execution of rebels after they were defeated in battle, and Charles was confirmed as king of Spain. He spent most of the rest of his life fighting the king of France, but in 1522, when he realised that Protestantism was spreading fast, he introduced the Inquisition in the Netherlands; and in 1523, two Protestant martyrs were burnt at the stake, singing hymns and shouting defiance.

But by the time the treaty of Crespy left Charles free to try and stamp out the Protestantism, the Protestant princes had formed their own defensive alliance, the Schmalkaldic league.

As his chief commander, Charles appointed the ambitious and sadistic Duke of Alva - who has strong claims to being the most wholly vicious character to make his appearance in this criminal history of mankind. (The only attractive episode in his life is a mad seventeen-day ride he made from Hungary - where he was fighting Turks - back to Spain to spend a few hours with his newly-married wife; the rest of his life is a saga of bigotry and torture.) But he was also a man of undoubted brilliance and courage. Making a dangerous crossing of the Elbe, Alva’s army swooped on the Protestants at Muhlberg and inflicted a shattering defeat. It was one of the most glorious days in the life of ‘the second Charlemagne’. Charles then marched his armies on to Wittenberg, no doubt regretting that his arch-enemy Luther had died in the previous year. After a siege, Wittenberg surrendered, and for a few days Charles must have believed that he had defeated Protestantism single-handed. Then he took a closer look at the German scene and his optimism evaporated. These people were grimly and fanatically Protestant; they hated the Catholics. A war would be a war to the death. And eight years later, after many battles and sieges, Charles had to acknowledge that he was never going to batter the Protestants into submission; he concluded the peace of Augsburg, allowing the Protestants freedom of worship within their own territories. In the same year, the exhausted and dispirited emperor abdicated and retired to a monastery, where he spent the remaining two years of his life flogging himself with a rope whose knots gradually wore away.