HISTORY of the CHRISTIAN CHURCH*

 § 50. Charles V.

Literature.

Most of the works on Charles V. are histories of his times, in which he forms the central figure. Much new material has been brought to light from the archives of Brussels and Simancas. He is extravagantly lauded by Spanish, and indiscriminately censured by French historians. The Scotch Robertson, the American Prescott, and the German Ranke are impartial.

I. Joh. Sleidan (d. 1556): De Statu Religionis et Reipublicae Carlo V. Caesare Commentarii, Argentor. 1555 fol. (best ed. by Am Ende, Frf.-a.-M., 1785). Ludw. v. Seckendorf: Com. Hist. et Apol. de Lutheranism sive de Reformatione Religionis, Leipzig, 1694.  Goes to the year 1546.—The English Calendars of State-Papers,—Spanish, published by the Master of the Rolls.—De Thou: Historia sui Temporis (from the death of Francis I.).—The Histories of Spain by Mariana (Madrid, 1817–22, 20 vols. 8vo); Zurita (Çaragoça, 1669–1710, 6 vols. fol.); Ferreras (French trans., Amsterdam, 1751, 10 vols. 4to); Salazar de Mendoza (Madrid, 1770–71, 3 vols. fol.); Modesto Lafuente (Vols. XI. and XII., 1853), etc.

II. Biographies. Charles dictated to his secretary, William Van Male, while leisurely sailing on the Rhine, from Cologne to Mayence, in June, 1550, and afterwards at Augsburg, under the refreshing shade of the Fugger gardens, a fragmentary autobiography, in spanish or French, which was known to exist, but disappeared, until Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, discovered in the National Library at Paris, in 1861, a Portuguese translation of it, and published a French translation from the same, with an introduction, under the title: Commentaires de Charles-Quint, Brussels, 1862. An English translation by Leonard Francis Simpson: The Autobiography of the Emperor Charles V., London, 1862 (161 and xlviii. pp.]. It is a summary of the Emperor’s journeys and expeditions ("Summario das Viages e Jornadas"), from 1516 to 1548. It dwells upon the secular events; but incidentally reveals, also, his feelings against the Protestants, whom he charges with heresy, obstinacy, and insolence, and against Pope Paul III., whom he hated for his arrogance, dissimulation, and breach of promise. Comp. on this work, the introduction of Lettenhove (translated by Simpson), and the acute criticism of Ranke, vol. vi. 75 sqq.

Alfonso Ulloa: Vita di Carlo V., Venet., 1560. Sandoval: Histoiria de la Vida y Hechos del Emperadòr Carlos Quinto, Valladolid, 1606 (Pampelona, 1618; Antwerp, 1681, 2 vols.). Sepulveda (Whom the Emperor selected as his biographer): De Rebus Gestis Caroli V. lmperatoris, Madrid, 1780 (and older editions). G. Leti: Vita del Imperatore Carlo V., 1700, 4vols. A. de Musica (in Menckenius, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, vol. I., Leipzig, 1728). William Robertson (d. 1793): The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V., London, 1769, 3 vols.; 6th ed., 1787, 4 vols.; new ed. of his Works, London, 1840, 8 vols. (vols. III., IV., V.); best ed., Phila. (Lippincott) 1857, 3 vols., with a valuable supplement by W. H. Prescott on the Emperor’s life after his abdication, from the archives of Simancas (III., 327–510). Hermann Baumgarten: Geschichte Karls V., Stuttgart, 1885 sqq. (to embrace 4 vols.; chiefly based on the English Calendars and the manuscript diaries of the Venetian historian Marino Sanuto).

III. Documents and Treatises on special parts of his history. G. Camposi: Carlo V. in Modena (in Archivio Storico Italiano, Florence, 1842–53, 25 vols., App.). D. G. van Male: Lettres sur la vie intérieure de l’Empéreur Charles-Quint, Brussels, 1843. K. Lanz: Correspondenz des Kaisers Karl V. aus dem kaiserlichen Archiv und der Bibliothèque de Burgogne in Brussel, Leipzig, 1844–46, 3 vols.; Staatspapiere zur Geschichte des Kaisers Karl V., Stuttgart, 1845; and Actenstücke und Briefe zur Geschichte Karls V., Wien, 1853–57. G. Heine: Briefe an Kaiser Karl V., geschrieben von seinem Beichtvater (Garcia de Loaysa) in den Jahren 1530–32, Berlin, 1848 (from the Simancas archives). Sir W. Maxwell Stirling: The Cloister-Life of Charles V., London, 1852. F. A. A. Mignet: Charles-Quint; son abdication, son séjour et sa mort au monastère de Yuste, Paris, 1854; and Rivalité de François I. et de Charles-Quint, 1875, 2 vols. Amédée Pichot: Charles-Quint, Chronique de sa vie intérieure et de sa vie politique, de son abdication et de sa retraite dans le cloître de Yuste, Paris, 1854. Gachart (keeper of the Belgic archives): Retraite et mort de Charles-Quint au monastère de Yuste (the original documents of Simancas), Brussels. 1854–55, 2 vols.; Correspondance de Charles-Quint et de Adrien VI., Brussels, 1859. Henne: Histoire du règne de Charles V. en Belgique, Brussels, 1858 sqq., 10 vols. Th. Juste: Les Pays-bas sous Charles V., 1861. Giuseppe de Leva: Storia documentata di Carlo V. in correlazione all’ Italia, Venice, 1863. Rösler: Die Kaiserwahl Karls V., Wien, 1868. W. Maurenbrecher: Karl V. und die deutschen Protestanten, 1545–1555, Düsseldorf, 1865; Studien und Skizzen zur Geschichte der Reformationszeit, Leipzig, 1874, pp. 99–133. A. v. Druffel: Kaiser Karl V. und die röm. Curie 1544–1546. 3 Abth. München, 1877 sqq.

IV. Comp. also Ranke: Deutsche Geschichte, I. 240 sqq., 311 sqq.; and on Charles’s later history in vols. II., III., IV., V., VI. Janssen: Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, II. 131 sqq., and vol. III. Weber: Allgemeine Weltgeschichte, vol. X. (1880), 1 sqq. Prescott’s Philip II., bk. I, chaps. 1 and 9 (vol. I. 1–26; 296–359). Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, vol. I., Introduction.

Before passing to the Diet of Worms, we must make the acquaintance of Charles V. He is, next to Martin Luther, the most conspicuous and powerful personality of his age. The history of his reign is the history of Europe for more than a third of a century (from 1520–1556).

In the midst of the early conflicts of the Reformation, the Emperor Maximilian I. died at Wels, Jan. 12, 1519. He had worn the German crown twenty-six years, and is called "the last Knight." With him the middle ages were buried, and the modern era dawned on Europe.

It was a critical period for the Empire: the religion of Mohammed threatened Christianity, Protestantism endangered Catholicism. From the East the Turks pushed their conquests to the walls of Vienna, as seven hundred years before, the Arabs, crossing the Pyrenees, had assailed Christian Europe from the West; in the interior the Reformation spread with irresistible force, and shook the foundations of the Roman Church. Where was the genius who could save both Christianity and the Reformation, the unity of the Empire and the unity of the Church?  A most difficult, yea, an impossible task.

The imperial crown descended naturally on Maximilian’s grandson, the young king of Spain, who became the most powerful monarch since the days of Charles the Great. He was the heir of four royal lines which had become united by a series of matrimonial alliances.

Never was a prince born to a richer inheritance, or entered upon public life with graver responsibilities, than Charles V. Spanish, Burgundian, and German blood mingled in his veins, and the good and bad qualities of his ramified ancestry entered into his constitution. He was born with his eventful century (Feb. 24, 1500), at Ghent in Flanders, and educated under the tuition of the Lord of Chièvres, and Hadrian of Utrecht, a theological professor of strict Dominican orthodoxy and severe piety, who by his influence became the successor of Leo X. in the papal chair. His father, Philip I., was the only son of Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy (daughter of Charles the Bold), and cuts a small figure among the sovereigns of Spain as "Philip the Handsome" (Filipe el Hermoso),—a frivolous, indolent, and useless prince. His mother was Joanna, called, "Crazy Jane" (Juana la Loca), second daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and famous for her tragic fate, her insanity, long imprisonment, and morbid devotion to the corpse of her faithless husband, for whom, during his life, she had alternately shown passionate love and furious jealousy. She became, after the death of her mother (Nov. 26, 1504), the nominal queen of Spain, and dragged out a dreary existence of seventy-six years (she died April 11, 1555).305

Charles inherited the shrewdness of Ferdinand, the piety of Isabella, and the melancholy temper of his mother which plunged her into insanity, and induced him to exchange the imperial throne for a monastic cell. The same temper reappeared in the gloomy bigotry of his son Philip II., who lived the life of a despot and a monk in his cloister-palace of the Escorial. The persecuting Queen Mary of England, a granddaughter of Isabella, and wife of Philip of Spain, had likewise a melancholy and desponding disposition.

From his ancestry Charles fell heir to an empire within whose boundaries the sun never set. At the death of his father (Sept. 25, 1506), he became, by right of succession, the sovereign of Burgundy and the Netherlands; at the death of Ferdinand (Jan. 23, 1516), he inherited the crown of Spain with her Italian dependencies (Naples, Sicily, Sardinia), and her newly acquired American possessions (to which were afterwards added the conquests of Mexico and Peru); at the death of Maximilian, he succeeded to the hereditary provinces of the house of Habsburg, and soon afterwards to the empire of Germany. In 1530 he was also crowned king of Lombardy, and emperor of the Romans, by the Pope.

The imperial crown of Germany was hotly contested between him and Francis I. All the arts of diplomacy and enormous sums of money were spent on electioneering by both parties. The details reveal a rotten state of the political morals of the times. Pope Leo at first favored the claims of King Francis, who was the natural rival of the Austrian and Burgundian power, but a stranger to the language and manners of Germany. The seven electors assembled at Frankfurt offered the dignity to the wisest of their number, Frederick of Saxony; but he modestly and wisely declined the golden burden lined with thorns. He would have protected the cause of the Reformation, but was too weak and too old for the government of an empire threatened by danger from without and within.306  He nominated Charles; and this self-denying act of a Protestant prince decided the election, June 28, 1520. When the ambassadors of Spain offered him a large reward for his generosity, he promptly refused for himself, and declared that he would dismiss any of his servants for taking a bribe.

Charles was crowned with unusual splendor, Oct. 23, at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), where the founder of the German Empire lies buried. In his oath he pledged himself to protect the Catholic faith, the Roman Church, and its head the Pope.

The new emperor was then only twenty years of age, and showed no signs of greatness.  "Nondum" ("Not yet") was the motto which he had adopted for his maiden shield in a tournament at Valladolid two years before. He afterwards exchanged it for "Plus Ultra." He was a good rider, and skilled in military exercises; he could break a lance with any Knight, and vanquish a bull in the ring, like an expert espada; but he was in feeble health, with a pale, beardless, and melancholy face, and without interest in public affairs. He had no sympathy with the German nation, and was ignorant of their language. But as soon as he took the reins of power into his own hands, he began to develop a rare genius for political and military government. His beard grew, and he acquired some knowledge of most of the dialects of his subjects. He usually spoke and wrote French and Spanish.

Charles V. as Emperor.

Without being truly great, he was an extraordinary man, and ranks, perhaps, next to Charlemagne and Otho I. among the German emperors.

He combined the selfish conservatism of the house of Habsburg, the religious ardor of the Spaniard, and the warlike spirit of the Dukes of Burgundy. He was the shrewdest prince in Europe, and an indefatigable worker. He usually slept only four hours a day. He was slow in forming his resolutions, but inflexible in carrying them into practice, and unscrupulous in choosing the means. He thought much, and spoke little; he listened to advice, and followed his own judgment. He had the sagacity to select and to keep the ablest men for his cabinet, the army and navy, and the diplomatic service. He was a good soldier, and could endure every hardship and privation except fasting. He was the first of the three great captains of his age, the Duke of Alva being the second, and Constable Montmorency the third.

His insatiable ambition involved him in several wars with France, in which he was generally successful against his bold but less prudent rival, Francis I. It was a struggle for supremacy in Italy, and in the Councils of Europe. He twice marched upon Paris.307

He engaged in about forty expeditions, by land and sea, in times when there were neither railroads nor steamboats. He seemed to be ubiquitous in his vast dominions. His greatest service to Christendom was his defeat of the army of Solyman the Magnificent, whom he forced to retreat to Constantinople (1532), and his rescue of twenty thousand Christian slaves and prisoners from the grasp of the African corsairs (1535), who, under the lead of the renowned Barbarossa, spread terror on the shores of the Mediterranean. These deeds raised him to the height of power in Europe.

But he neglected the internal affairs of Germany, and left them mostly to his brother Ferdinand. He characterized the Germans as "dreamy, drunken, and incapable of intrigue." He felt more at home in the rich Netherlands, which furnished him the greatest part of his revenues. But Spain was the base of his monarchy, and the chief object of his care. Under his reign, America began to play a part in the history of Europe as a mine of gold and silver.

He aimed at an absolute monarchy, with a uniformity in religion, but that was an impossibility; France checked his political, Germany his ecclesiastical ambition.

His Personal Character.

In his private character he was superior to Francis I., Henry VIII., and most contemporary princes, but by no means free from vice. He was lacking in those personal attractions which endear a sovereign to his subjects.308  Under a cold and phlegmatic exterior he harbored fiery passions. He was calculating, revengeful, implacable, and never forgave an injury. He treated Francis I., and the German Protestant princes in the Schmalkaldian war, with heartless severity. He was avaricious, parsimonious, and gluttonous. He indulged in all sorts of indigestible delicacies,—anchovies, frogs’ legs, eel-pasties,—and drank large quantities of iced beer and Rhine wine; he would not listen to the frequent remonstrances of his physicians and confessors, and would rather endure the discomforts of dyspepsia and gout than restrain his appetite, which feasted on twenty dishes at a single meal. In his autobiography he speaks of a fourteenth attack of gout, which "lasted till the spring of 1548."309

He had taste for music and painting. He had also some literary talent, and wrote or dictated an autobiography in the simple, objective style of Caesar, ending with the defeat of the Protestant league (1548); but it is dry and cold, destitute of great ideas and noble sentiments.

He married his cousin, Donna Isabella of Portugal, at Seville, 1526, and lived in happy union with her till her sudden death in 1539; but during his frequent absences from Spain, where she always remained, as well as before his marriage, and after her death, he indulged in ephemeral unlawful attachments.310  He had at least two illegitimate children, the famous Margaret, Duchess of Parma, and Don Juan of Austria, the hero of Lepanto (1547–1578), who lies buried by his side in the Escorial.

Charles has often been painted by the master hand of Titian, whom he greatly admired. He was of middle size, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, with a commanding forehead, an aquiline nose, a pale, grave, and melancholy countenance. His blue and piercing eye, his blonde, almost reddish hair, and fair skin, betokened his German origin, and his projecting lower jaw, with its thick, heavy lip, was characteristic of the princes of Habsburg; but otherwise he looked like a Spaniard, as he was at heart.

Incessant labors and cares, gluttony, and consequent gout, undermined his constitution, and at the age of fifty he was prematurely old, and had to be carried on a litter like a helpless cripple. Notwithstanding his many victories and successes, he was in his later years an unhappy and disappointed man, but sought and found his last comfort in the religion of his fathers.

 § 51. The Ecclesiastical Policy of Charles V.

The ecclesiastical policy of Charles was Roman Catholic without being ultramontane. He kept his coronation oath. All his antecedents were in favor of the traditional faith. He was surrounded by ecclesiastics and monks. He was thoroughly imbued with the Spanish type of piety, of which his grandmother is the noblest and purest representative. Isabella the Catholic, the greatest of Spanish sovereigns, "the queen of earthly queens."311  conquered the Moors, patronized the discoverer of America, expelled the Jews, and established the Inquisition,—all for the glory of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic religion.312  A genuine Spaniard believes, with Gonzalo of Oviedo, that "powder against the infidels is incense to the Lord." With him, as with his Moorish antipode, the measure of conviction is the measure of intolerance, and persecution the evidence of zeal. The burning of heretics became in the land of the Inquisition a sacred festival, an "act of faith;"313 and such horrid spectacles were in the reign of Philip II. as popular as the bull-fights which still flourish in Spain, and administer to the savage taste for blood.

Charles heard the mass daily, listened to a sermon on Sunday and holy days, confessed and communed four times a year, and was sometimes seen in his tent at midnight on his knees before the crucifix. He never had any other conception of Christianity than the Roman-Catholic, and took no time to investigate theological questions.

He fully approved of the Pope’s bull against Luther, and ordered it to be executed in the Netherlands. In his retreat at Yuste, he expressed regret that he had kept his promise of safe-conduct; in other words, that he had not burned the heretic at Worms, as Sigismund had burned Hus at Constance. He never showed the least sympathy with the liberal tendencies of the age, and regarded Protestantism as a rebellion against Church and State. He would have crushed it out if he had had the power; but it was too strong for him, and he needed the Protestant support for his wars against France, and against the Turks. He began in the Netherlands that fearful persecution which was carried on by his more bigoted son, Philip II., but it provoked the uprising of the people, and ended in the establishment of the Dutch Republic.314  He subdued the Lutheran league in the Schmalkaldian war; pale as death, but trusting in God, he rushed into the hottest of the fight at Mühlberg, and greeted the decisive victory of 1547 with the words: "I came, I saw, and God conquered."315  But the height of his power was the beginning of his decline. The same Saxon Elector, Moritz, who had aided him against the Protestant princes, turned against him in 1552, and secured in the treaty of Passau, for the first time, some degree of legal toleration to the Lutherans in Germany.

But while Charles was a strict Roman Catholic from the beginning to the end of his life, he was, nevertheless, by no means a blind and slavish papist. Like his predecessors on the German throne, be maintained the dignity and the sovereignty of the state against the claims of hierarchical supremacy. He hated the French, or neutral, politics of the papal court. His troops even captured Rome, and imprisoned Clement VII., who had formed a league with Francis I. against him (1527). He quarreled with Pope Paul III., who in turn severely protested against his tolerant or hesitating policy towards the Protestants in Germany. He says, in his Autobiography,316 that "the Pope’s emissaries, and some ecclesiastics, were incessantly endeavoring to induce him to take up arms against the Protestants (tomar as armas contra os protestantes)," but that he "hesitated on account of the greatness and difficulty of such an enterprise."

Moreover, Charles had a certain zeal for a limited reformation of church discipline on the basis of the Catholic doctrine and the papal hierarchy. He repeatedly urged a general council, against the dilatory policy of the Popes, and exhorted Protestants and Catholics alike to submit to its decisions as final. Speaking of the Diet of Augsburg, held in 1530, he says that he, asked his Holiness to convoke and assemble a general council, as most important and necessary to remedy what was taking place in Germany, and the errors which were being propagated throughout Christendom."317  This was likewise consistent with Spanish tradition. Isabella the Catholic, and Cardinal Ximenes, had endeavored to reform the clergy and monks in Spain.318

This Roman-Catholic reformation was effected by the Council of Trent, but turned out to be a papal counter-reformation, and a weapon against Protestantism in the hands of the Spanish order of the Jesuits.

The Emperor and the Reformer.

Charles and Luther saw each other once, and only once, at the Diet of Worms. The Emperor was disgusted with the monk who dared to set his private judgment and conscience against the time-honored creed of Christendom, and declared that he would never make him a heretic. But Luther wrote him a respectful letter of thanks for his safe-conduct.319

Twenty years later, after his victory over John Frederick of Saxony at Mühlberg on the Elbe (April 24, 1547), Charles stood on the grave of Luther in the castle church of Wittenberg, and was advised by the bloodthirsty Duke of Alva to dig up and burn the bones of the arch-heretic, and to scatter the ashes to the winds of heaven; but he declined with the noble words:, I make war on the living, not on the dead." This was his nearest approach to religious toleration. But the interesting incident is not sufficiently authenticated.320

For twenty-six years the Emperor and the Reformer stood at the head of Germany, the one as a political, the other as a religious, leader; working in opposite directions,—the one for the preservation of the old, the other for the creation of the new, order of things. The one had the army and treasure of a vast empire at his command; the other had nothing but his faith and pen, and yet made a far deeper and more lasting impression on his and on future ages. Luther died peacefully in his birthplace, trusting in the merits of Christ, and commending his soul to the God who redeemed him. Ten years later Charles ended his life as a monk in Spain, holding a burning candle in the right hand, and pressing with the left the crucifix to his lips, while the Archbishop of Toledo intoned the Psalm De Profundis. The last word of the dying Emperor was "Jesus."

 § 52. The Abdication of Charles, and his Cloister Life.

The abdication of Charles, and his subsequent cloister life, have a considerable interest for ecclesiastical as well as general history, and may by anticipation be briefly noted in this place.

In the year 305, the last of the imperial persecutors of Christianity, who was born a slave and reached his power by military achievements, voluntarily resigned the throne of the Caesars, and retired for the remaining eight years of his life to his native Salona in Dalmatia to raise cabbages. In the year 1555 (Oct. 25), Charles V., who was born an heir of three kingdoms, wearied of the race of politics, diplomacy, and war, defeated by the treason of Moritz, and tormented by gout, abdicated his crown to live and die like an humble monk.

The abdication of Charles took place in the royal palace at Brussels, in the same hall in which, forty years before, he had been declared of age, and had assumed the reign of Brabant. He was dressed in mourning for his unfortunate mother, and wore only one ornament,—the superb collar of the Golden Fleece. He looked grave, solemn, pale, broken: he entered leaning on a staff with one hand, and on the arm of William of Orange with the other; behind him came Philip II., his son and heir, small, meager, timid, but magnificently dressed,—a momentous association with the two youthful princes who were to be afterwards arrayed in deadly conflict for the emancipation of the Netherlands from the yoke of Spanish tyranny and bigotry.321

The Emperor rose from the throne, and with his right hand resting on the shoulder of the Prince of Orange,—who was one day to become the most formidable enemy of his house,—and holding a paper in the other hand, he addressed his farewell in French before the members of the royal family, the nobility of the Netherlands, the Knights of the Golden Fleece, the royal counselors, and the great officers of the household. He assured them that he had done his duty to the best of his ability, mindful of his dear native land, and especially of the interests of Christianity against infidels and heretics. He had shrunk from no toil; but a cruel malady now deprived him of strength to endure the cares of government, and this was his only motive for carrying out a long-cherished wish of resigning the scepter. He exhorted them above all things to maintain the purity of the faith. He had committed many errors, but only from ignorance, and begged pardon if he had wronged any one.

He then resigned the crown of the Netherlands to his son Philip with the exhortation, "Fear God: live justly; respect the laws; above all, cherish the interests of religion."

Exhausted, and pale as a corpse, he fell back upon his seat amid the tears and sobs of the assembly.322

On the 16th of January, 1556, he executed the deeds by which he ceded the sovereignty of Castile and Aragon, with their dependencies, to Philip. His last act was to resign the crown of Germany into the hands of his brother Ferdinand; but, as affairs move slowly in that country, the resignation was not finally acted on till Feb. 28, 1558, at the Diet at Frankfurt.323

His Retirement to Yuste.

On the 17th of September Charles sailed from the harbor of Flushing for Spain with a fleet of fifty-six sails, his two sisters (Mary, formerly queen of Hungary, and regent of the Low Countries, and Eleanor, the widow of King Francis of France), and a hundred and fifty select persons of the imperial household.

After a boisterous voyage, and a tedious land-journey, he arrived, Feb. 3, 1557, at the Convent of St. Gerome in Yuste, which he had previously selected for his retreat.

The resolution to exchange the splendors of the world for monastic seclusion was not uncommon among the rulers and nobles of Spain; and the rich convents of Montserrat and Poblet (now in ruins) had special accommodations for royal and princely guests. Charles had formed it during the lifetime of the Empress Isabella, and agreed with her that they would spend the rest of their days in neighboring convents, and be buried under the same altar. In 1542 he announced his intention to Francisco de Borgia; but the current of events involved him in a new and vain attempt to restore once more the Holy Roman Empire in the fullness of its power. Now his work was done, and he longed for rest. His resolution was strengthened by the desire to atone for sins of unchastity committed after the death of his wife.324

Yuste is situated in the mountainous province of Estremadura, about eight leagues from Plasencia and fifty leagues from Valladolid (then the capital of Spain), in a well-watered valley and a salubrious climate, and was in every way well fitted for the wishes of the Emperor.325

Here he spent about eighteen months till his death,—a remarkable instance of the old adage, Sie transit gloria mundi.

His Cloister Life.

There is something grand and romantic, as well as sad and solemn, in the voluntary retirement of a monarch who had swayed a scepter of unlimited power over two hemispheres, and taken a leading part in the greatest events of an eventful century. There is also an idyllic charm in the combination of the innocent amusements of country life with the exercises of piety.

The cloister life of Charles even more than his public life reveals his personal and religious character. It was represented by former historians as the life of a devout and philosophic recluse, dead to the world and absorbed in preparation for the awful day of judgment;326 but the authentic documents of Simancas, made known since 1844, correct and supplement this view.

He lived not in the convent with the monks, but in a special house with eight rooms built for him three years before. It opened into gardens alive with aromatic plants, flowers, orange, citron, and fig trees, and protected by high walls against intruders. From the window of his bedroom he could look into the chapel, and listen to the music and prayers of the friars, when unable to attend. He retained over fifty servants, mostly Flemings, including a major-domo (who was a Spaniard), an almoner, a keeper of the wardrobe, a keeper of the jewels, chamberlains, secretaries, physician, confessor, two watchmakers, besides cooks, confectioners, bakers, brewers, game-keepers, and numerous valets.327  Some of them lived in a neighboring village, and would have preferred the gay society of Brussels to the dull monotony of solitude. He was provided with canopies, Turkish carpets, velvet-lined arm-chairs, six cushions and a footstool for his gouty limbs, twenty-five suits of tapestry, sixteen robes of silk and velvet lined with ermine or eider-down, twelve hangings of the finest black cloth, four large clocks of elaborate workmanship, and a number of pocket-watches. The silver furniture for his table and kitchen amounted to fourteen thousand ounces in weight. The walls of his room were adorned with choice pictures, nine from the pencil of Titian (including four portraits of himself and one of the Empress). He had also a small library, mostly of devotional books.328

He took exercise in his gardens, carried on a litter. He constructed, with the aid of a skilled artisan, a little handmill for grinding wheat, puppet soldiers, clocks and watches, and endeavored in vain to make an two of them run exactly alike. The fresh mountain air and exercise invigorated his health, and he never felt better than in 1557.

He continued to take a lively interest in public affairs, and the events of the times. He greeted with joy the victory of St. Quentin; with partial dissatisfaction, the conclusion of peace with the Pope (whom he would have treated more severely); with regret, the loss of Calais; with alarm, the advance of the Turkish fleet to Spain, and the progress of the Lutheran heresy. He received regular dispatches and messengers, was constantly consulted by his son, and freely gave advice in the new complications with France, and especially also in financial matters. He received visits from his two sisters,—the dowager queens of Hungary and France, who had accompanied him to Spain,—and from the nobles of the surrounding country; he kept up a constant correspondence with his daughter Joanna, regent of Castile, and with his sister, the regent of Portugal.

He maintained the stately Castilian etiquette of dining alone, though usually in the presence of his physician, secretary, and confessor, who entertained him on natural history or other topics of interest. Only once he condescended to partake of a scanty meal with the friars. He could not control, even in these last years, his appetite for spiced capons, pickled sausages, and eel-pies, although his stomach refused to do duty, and caused him much suffering.

But he tried to atone for this besetting sin by self-flagellation, which he applied to his body so severely during Lent that the scourge was found stained with his blood. Philip cherished this precious memorial of his father’s piety, and bequeathed it as an heirloom to his son.329

From the beginning of his retreat, and especially in the second year, Charles fulfilled his religious duties with scrupulous conscientiousness, as far as his health would permit. He attended mass in the chapel, said his prayers, and listened to sermons and the reading of selections from the Fathers (Jerome, Augustin, Bernard), the Psalms, and the Epistles of Paul. He favored strict discipline among the friars, and gave orders that any woman who dared to approach within two bow-shots of the gate should receive a hundred stripes. He enjoyed the visits of Francisco Borgia, Duke of Gandia, who had exchanged a brilliant position for membership in the Society of the Jesuits, and confirmed him in his conviction that he had acted wisely in relinquishing the world. He wished to be prayed for only by his baptismal name, being no longer emperor or king. Every Thursday was for him a feast of Corpus Christi.

He repeatedly celebrated the exequies of his parents, his wife, and a departed sister.

Yea, according to credible contemporary testimony, he celebrated, in the presentiment of approaching death, his own funeral, around a huge catafalque erected in the dark chapel. Bearing a lighted taper, he mingled with his household and the monks in chanting the prayers for the departed, on the lonely passage to the invisible world, and concluded the doleful ceremony by handing the taper to the priest, in token of surrendering his spirit to Him who gave it. According to later accounts, the Emperor was laid alive in his coffin, and carried in solemn procession to the altar.330

This relish for funeral celebrations reveals a morbid trait in his piety. It reminds one of the insane devotion of his mother to the dead body of her husband, which she carried with her wherever she went.

His Intolerance.

We need not wonder that his bigotry increased toward the end of life. He was not philosopher enough to learn a lesson of toleration (as Dr. Robertson imagines) from his inability to harmonize two timepieces. On the contrary, he regretted his limited forbearance towards Luther and the German Protestants, who had defeated his plans five years before. They were now more hateful to him than ever.

To his amazement, the same heretical opinions broke out in Valladolid and Sevilla, at the very court and around the throne of Spain. Augustin Cazalla,331 who had accompanied him as chaplain in the Smalkaldian war, and had preached before him at Yuste, professed Lutheran sentiments. Charles felt that Spain was in danger, and repeatedly urged the most vigorous measures for the extermination of heresy with fire and sword. "Tell the Grand Inquisitor, from me," he wrote to his daughter Joanna, the regent, on the 3d of May, 1558, "to be at his post, and to lay the ax at the root of the evil before it spreads farther. I rely on your zeal for bringing the guilty to punishment with all the severity which their crimes demand." In the last codicil to his will, he conjures his son Philip to cherish the Holy Inquisition as the best instrument for the suppression of heresy in his dominions. "So," he concludes, "shall you have my blessing, and the Lord shall prosper all your undertakings."332

Philip II., who inherited the vices but none of the virtues of his father, faithfully carried out this dying request, and by a terrible system of persecution crushed out every trace of evangelical Protestantism in Spain, and turned that beautiful country into a graveyard adorned by somber cathedrals, and disfigured by bull-rings.

His Death.

The Emperor’s health failed rapidly in consequence of a new attack of gout, and the excessive heat of the summer, which cost the life of several of his Flemish companions. He died Sept. 21, 1558, a consistent Catholic as be had lived. A few of his spiritual and secular friends surrounded his death-bed. He confessed with deep contrition his sins; prayed repeatedly for the unity of the Church; received, kneeling in his bed, the holy communion and the extreme unction; and placed his hope on the crucified Redeemer. The Archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé de Carranza, read the one hundred and thirtieth Psalm, and, holding up a crucifix, said: "Behold Him who answers for all. There is no more sin; all is forgiven;" while another of his preachers commended him to the intercession of saints, namely, St. Matthew, on whose day he was born, and St. Matthias, on whose day he was in a few moments to leave this world.

"Thus," says Mignet, "the two doctrines which divided the world in the age of Charles V. were once more brought before him on the bed of death."

It is an interesting fact, that the same archbishop who had taken a prominent part in the persecution of English Protestants under Queen Mary, and who administered the last and truly evangelical comfort to the dying Emperor, became a victim of persecution, and that those very words of comfort were used by the Emperor’s confessor as one of the grounds of the charge of heresy before the tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition. Bartolomé de Carranza was seven years imprisoned in Spain, then sent to Rome, lodged in the Castle of St. Angelo, after long delay found guilty of sixteen Lutheranizing propositions in his writings, suspended from the exercise of his episcopal functions, and sentenced to be shut up for five years in a convent of his order. He died sixteen days after the judgment, in the Convent Sopra Minerva, May 2, 1576, "declaring his innocence with tears in his eyes, and yet with strange inconsistency admitting the justice of his sentence."333

In less than two months after the decease of the Emperor, Queen Mary, his cousin, and wife of his son, died, Nov. 17, 1558, and was borne to her rest in Westminster Abbey. With her the Roman hierarchy collapsed, and the reformed religion, after five years of bloody persecution, was permanently restored on the throne and in the Church of England. In view of this coincidence, we may well exclaim with Ranke, "How far do the thoughts of Divine Providence exceed the thoughts and purposes of men!"334

His Tomb.

From Yuste the remains of the once mighty Emperor were removed in 1574 to their last resting-place under the altar of the cathedral of the Escorial. That gloomy structure, in a dreary mountain region some thirty miles north of Madrid, was built by his order as a royal burial-place (between 1563 and 1584), and combines a palace, a monastery, a cathedral, and a tomb (called Pantheon). Philip II., "el Escorialense," spent there fourteen years, half king, half monk, boasting that he ruled the Old and New World from the foot of a mountain with two inches of paper. He died, after long and intense suffering, Sept. 13, 1598, in a dark little room facing the altar of the church.

Father and son are represented in gilt-bronze statues, opposite each other, in kneeling posture, looking to the high altar; Charles V., with his wife Isabella, his daughter Maria, and his sisters Eleonora and Maria; Philip II., with three of his wives, and his weak-minded and unfortunate son, Don Carlos.

The Escorial, like Spain itself, is only a shadow of the past, inhabited by the ghost of its founder, who entombed in it his own gloomy character.335

 § 53. The Diet of Worms. 1521.

I. Sources. Acta et res gestae D. M. Luth. in Comitiis Principum Wormatiae. Anno 1521. 4°. Acta Lutheri in Comitiis Wormatiae ed. Pollicarius, Vitb. 1546. These and other contemporary documents are reprinted in the Jena ed. of Luther’s Opera (1557), vol. II.; in Walch’s German ed., vols. XV., 2018–2325, and XXII., 2026 sqq.; and the Erlangen-Frankf. ed. of the Opera Lat., vol. VI. (1872); Vermischte deutsche Schriften, vol. XII. (or Sämmtl. Werke, vol. LXIV., pub. 1855), pp. 366–383. Förstemann: Neues Urkundenbuch, 1842, vol. I. Luther’s Letters to Spalatin, Cuspinianus, Lucas Cranach, Charles V., etc., see in De Wette, I. 586 sqq. Spalatin: Ann. Spalatin is also, according to Köstlin, the author of the contemporary pamphlet: Etliche wunderliche fleissige Handlung in D. M. Luther’s Sachen durch geistliche und weltliche Fürsten des Reich’s; but Brieger (in his "Zeitschrift für Kirchengesch.,"  Gotha, 1886, p. 482 sqq.) ascribes it to Rudolph von Watzdorf.

On the Roman-Cath. side, Cochläus (who was present at Worms): Pallavicini (who used the letters of Aleander); and especially the letters and dispatches of Aleander, now published as follows: Johann Friedrich: Der Reichstag zu Worms im Jahr 1521. Nach den Briefen des päpstlichen Nuntius Hieronymus Aleander. In the "Abhandlungen der Bayer. Akad.," vol. XI. München, 1870. Pietro Balan (R. Cath.): Monumenta Reform. Lutheranae ex tabulariis S. Sedis secretis. 1521–1525. Ratisb. Fasc. I., 1883. Contains Aleander’s reports from the papal archives, and is one of the first fruits of the liberal policy of Leo XIII. in opening the literary treasures of the Vatican. Theod. Brieger (Prof. of Ch. Hist. in Leipzig): Aleander und Luther, 1521. Die vervollständigten Aleander-Depeschen nebst Untersuchungen über den Wormser Reichstag. 1 Abth. Gotha, 1884 (315 pages). Gives the Aleander dispatches in Italian and Latin from a MS. in the library of Trent, and supplements and partly corrects, in the chronology, the edition of Balan.

II. Special Treatises. Boye: Luther zu Worms. Halle, 1817, 1824. Zimmer: Luther zu Worms. Heidelb. 1521. Tuzschmann: Luther in Worms. Darmstadt, 1860. Soldan: Der Reichstag zu Worms. Worms, 1863. Steitz: Die Melanchthon- und Luther-Herbergen zu Frankfurt-a.-M. Frankf., 1861. Contains the reports of the Frankfurt delegate Fürstenberg, and other documents. Hennes (R. Cath.): M. Luther’s Aufenthalt in Worms. Mainz, 1868. Waltz: Der Wormser Reichstag und seine Beziehungen zur reformator. Bewegung, in the "Forschungen zur deutschen Gesch."  Göttingen, 1868, VIII. pp. 21–44. Dan. Schenkel: Luther in Worms. Elberfeld, 1870. Jul. Köstlin: Luther’s Rede in Worms am 18. April, 1521. Halle, 1874 (the best on Luther’s famous declaration). Maurenbrecher: Der Wormser Reichstag von 1521, in his "Studien und Skizzen zur Gesch. der Reform. Zeit,"  Leipzig, 1874 (pp. 241–275); also in his Gesch. der kathol. Reformation, Nördlingen, 1880, vol. I., pp. 181–201. Karl Jansen (not to be confounded with the Rom.-Cath. Janssen): Aleander am Reichstage zu Worms, 1521. Kiel, 1883 (72 pages). Corrects Friedrich’s text of Aleander’s letters. Th. Kolde: Luther und der Reichstag zu Worms. 2d ed. Halle, 1883. Brieger: Neue Mittheilungen über L. in Worms. Program to the Luther jubilee, Marburg, 1883 (a critique of Balan’s Monumenta). Kalkoff: Germ. transl. of the Aleander Dispatches, Halle, 1886. Elter: Luther u. der Wormser Reichstag. Bonn, 1886.

III. Ranke, I. 311–343. Gieseler, IV. 56–58 (Am. ed.). Merle D’aub., bk. VII. chs. I. -XI. Hagenbach, III. 103–109. G. P. Fisher, pp. 108–111. Köstlin, chs. XVII. and XVIII. (I. 411–466). Kolde, I. 325 sqq. Janssen (R. Cath.), II. 131–166. G. Weber: Das Zeitalter der Reformation (vol. X. of his Weltgeschichte), Leipzig, 1886, pp. 162–178. Baumgarten: Gesch. Karls V. Leipzig, l885, vol. I. 379–460.

On the 28th of January, 1521, Charles V. opened his first Diet at Worms. This was a free imperial city on the left bank of the Rhine, in the present grand-duchy of Hesse.336  It is famous in German song as the scene of the Niebelungenlied, which opens with King Günther of Worms and his sister Chriemhild, the world’s wonder for grace and beauty. It is equally famous in ecclesiastical history for "the Concordat of Worms," which brought to an end the long contest between the Emperor and the Pope about investiture (Sept. 23, 1122). But its greatest fame the city acquired by Luther’s heroic stand on the word of God and the rights of conscience, which made the Diet of 1521 one of the most important in the history of German Diets. After that event two conferences of Protestant and Roman-Catholic leaders were held in Worms, to heal the breach of the Reformation,—one in 1541, and one in 1557; but both failed of their object. In 1868 (June 25) a splendid monument to Luther and his fellow-laborers by Rietschel was erected at Worms, and dedicated with great national enthusiasm.337

The religious question threw all the political and financial questions into the background, and absorbed the attention of the public mind.

At the very beginning of the Diet a new papal brief called upon the Emperor to give, by an imperial edict, legal force to the bull of January 3, by which Luther was finally excommunicated, and his books condemned to the flames. The Pope urged him to prove his zeal for the unity of the Church. God had girded him with supreme earthly power, that he might use it against heretics who were much worse than infidels.338  On Maundy Thursday, March 28, the Pope, in proclaiming the terrible bull In Coena Domini, which is annually read at Rome, expressly condemned, among other heretics, Martin Luther by name with all his adherents. This was the third or fourth excommunication, but produced little effect.339

The Pope was ably represented by two Italian legates, who were afterwards created cardinals, -Marino Caracciolo (1459–1538) for the political affairs, and Jerome Aleander (1480–1542) for the ecclesiastical interests. Aleander was at that time librarian of the Vatican, and enjoyed great reputation as a Greek scholar. He had lectured at Paris before two thousand bearers of all classes. He stood in friendly relations to Erasmus; but when the latter showed sympathy with the Reformation, be denounced him as the chief founder of the Lutheran heresy. He was an intense papist, and skilled in all the arts of diplomacy. His religious wants were not very pressing. During the Diet of Worms he scarcely found time, in the holy week, "to occupy himself a little with Christ and his conscience." His sole object was to maintain the power of the Pope, and to annihilate the new heresy. In his letters he calls Luther a fool, a dog, a basilisk, a ribald. He urged everywhere the wholesale burning of his books.340  He employed argument, persuasion, promises, threats, spies, and bribes. He complained that he could not get money enough from Rome for greedy officials. He labored day and night with the Emperor, his confessor, and the members of the privy council. He played on their fears of a popular revolution, and reminded them of the example of the Bohemians, the worst and most troublesome of heretics. He did not shrink from the terrible threat, "If ye Germans who pay least into the Pope’s treasury shake off his yoke, we shall take care that ye mutually kill yourselves, and wade in your own blood." He addressed the Diet, Feb. 13, in a speech of three hours, and contended that Luther’s final condemnation left no room for a further hearing of the heretic, but imposed upon the Emperor and the Estates the simple duty to execute the requirements of the papal bull.

The Emperor hesitated between his religious impulses—which were decidedly Roman Catholic, though with a leaning towards disciplinary reform through a council—and political considerations which demanded caution and forbearance. He had already taken lessons in the art of dissimulation, which was deemed essential to a ruler in those days. He had to respect the wishes of the Estates, and could not act without their consent. Public sentiment was divided, and there was a possibility of utilizing the dissatisfaction with Rome for his interest. He was displeased with Leo for favoring the election of Francis, and trying to abridge the powers of the Spanish Inquisition; and yet he felt anxious to secure his support in the impending struggle with France, and the Pope met him half-way by recalling his steps against the Inquisition. He owed a debt of gratitude to the Elector Frederick, and had written to him, Nov. 28, 1520, to bring Luther to Worms, that he might have a hearing before learned men; but the Elector declined the offer, fearing the result. On the 17th of December, the Emperor advised him to keep Luther at Wittenberg, as he had been condemned at Rome.

At first be inclined to severe measures, and laid the draft of an edict before the Diet whereby the bull of excommunication should be legally enforced throughout all Germany. But this was resisted by the Estates, and other influences were brought to bear upon him. Then he tried indirectly, and in a private way, a compromise through his confessor, John Glapio, a Franciscan friar, who professed some sympathy with reform, and respect for Luther’s talent and zeal. He held several interviews with Dr. Brück (Pontanus), the Chancellor of the Elector Frederick. He assured him of great friendship, and proposed that he should induce Luther to disown or to retract the book on the "Babylonian Captivity," which was detestable; in this case, his other writings, which contained so much that is good, would bear fruit to the Church, and Luther might co-operate with the Emperor in the work of a true (that is, Spanish) reformation of ecclesiastical abuses. We have no right to doubt his sincerity any more than that of the like-minded Hadrian VI., the teacher of Charles. But the Elector would not listen to such a proposal, and refused a private audience to Glapio. His conference with Hutten and Sickingen on the Ebernburg was equally unsuccessful.341

The Estates were in partial sympathy with the Reformation, not from doctrinal and religious, but from political and patriotic motives; they repeated the old one hundred and one gravamina against the tyranny and extortions of the Roman See342 (similar to the charges in Luther’s Address to the German Nobility), and resisted a condemnation of Luther without giving him a hearing. Even his greatest enemy, Duke George of Saxony, declared that the Church suffered most from the immorality of the clergy, and that a general reformation was most necessary, which could be best secured by a general council.

During the Diet, Ulrich von Hutten exerted all his power of invective against the Pope and for Luther. He was harbored at Ebernburg, a few leagues from Worms, with his friend, the valorous Francis of Sickingen. He poured contempt and ridicule on the speech of Aleander, and even attempted to catch him and Caracciolo by force.343  But he and Sickingen favored, at the same time, the cause of the young Emperor, from whom they expected great things, and wished to bring about an anti-papal revolution with his aid. Hutten called upon him to dismiss his clerical counsellors, to stand on his own dignity, to give Luther a hearing, and to build up a free Germany. Freedom was now in the air, and all men of intelligence longed for a new and better order of things.344

Aleander was scarcely safe on the street after his speech of February 13. He reported to his master, that for nine-tenths of the Germans the name of Luther was a war-cry, and that the last tenth screamed "Death to the court of Rome!" Cochlaeus, who was in Worms as the theological adviser of the Archbishop of Treves, feared a popular uprising against the clergy.

Luther was the hero of the day, and called a new Moses, a second Paul. His tracts and picture, surrounded by a halo of glory, were freely circulated in Worms.345

At last Charles thought it most prudent to disregard the demand of the Pope. In an official letter of March 6, he cited Luther to appear before the Diet within twenty-one days under the sure protection of the Empire. The Elector Frederick, Duke George of Saxony, and the Landgrave of Hesse, added letters of safe-conduct through their respective territories.346

Aleander now endeavored to make the appearance of Luther as harmless as possible, and succeeded in preventing any discussion with him. The heretic was simply to recant, or, in case of refusal, to suffer the penalties of excommunication.

 § 54. Luther’s Journey to Worms.

"Mönchlein, Mönchlein, Du gehest einen schweren Gang."

Luther, from the first intimation of a summons by the Emperor, regarded it as a call from God, and declared his determination to go to Worms, though he should be carried there sick, and at the risk of his life. His motive was not to gratify an unholy ambition, but to bear witness to the truth. He well knew the tragic fate which overtook Hus at Constance notwithstanding the safe-conduct, but his faith inspired him with fearless courage. "You may expect every thing from me," he wrote to Spalatin, "except fear or recantation. I shall not flee, still less recant. May the Lord Jesus strengthen me."347

He shared for a while the hope of Hutten and Sickingen, that the young Emperor would give him at least fair play, and renew the old conflict of Germany with Rome; but he was doomed to disappointment.

While the negotiations in Worms were going on, he used incessantly his voice and his pen, and alternated between devotional and controversial exercises. He often preached twice a day, wrote commentaries on Genesis, the Psalms, and the Magnificat (the last he finished in March), and published the first part of his Postil (Sermons on the Gospels and Epistles), a defense of his propositions condemned by Rome, and fierce polemical books against Hieronymus Emser, Ambrose Catharinus, and other papal opponents.

Emser, a learned Romanist, and secretary of Duke George of Saxony, had first attacked Luther after the Leipzig disputation, at which he was present. A bitter controversy followed, in which both forgot dignity and charity. Luther called Emser "the Goat of Leipzig" (in reference to the escutcheon of his family), and Emser called Luther in turn, the Capricorn of Wittenberg." Luther’s Antwort auf das überchristliche, übergeistliche, und überkünstliche Buch Bock Emser’s, appeared in March, 1521, and defends his doctrine of the general priesthood of believers.348  Emser afterwards severely criticised Luther’s translation of the Bible, and published his own version of the New Testament shortly before his death (1527).

Catharinus,349 an eminent Dominican at Rome, had attacked Luther toward the end of December, 1520. Luther in his Latin reply tried to prove from Dan. 8:25 sqq.; 2 Thess. 2:3 sqq.; 2 Tim. 4:3 sqq.; 2 Pet. 2:1 sqq.; and the Epistle of Jude, that popery was the Antichrist predicted in the Scriptures, and would soon be annihilated by the Lord himself at his second coming, which he thought to be near at hand.

It is astonishing that in the midst of the war of theological passions, he could prepare such devotional books as his commentaries and sermons, which are full of faith and practical comfort. He lived and moved in the heart of the Scriptures; and this was the secret of his strength and success.

On the second of April, Luther left Wittenberg, accompanied by Amsdorf, his friend and colleague, Peter Swaven, a Danish student, and Johann Pezensteiner, an Augustinian brother. Thus the faculty, the students, and his monastic order were represented. They rode in an open farmer’s wagon, provided by the magistrate of the city. The imperial herald in his coat-of-arms preceded on horseback. Melanchthon wished to accompany his friend, but he was needed at home. "If I do not return," said Luther in taking leave of him, "and my enemies murder me, I conjure thee, dear brother, to persevere in teaching the truth. Do my work during my absence: you can do it better than I. If you remain, I can well be spared. In thee the Lord has a more learned champion."

At Weimar, Justus Jonas joined the company. He was at that time professor and Canon at Erfurt. In June of the same year he moved to Wittenberg as professor of church law and provost, and became one of the most intimate friends and co-workers of Luther. He accompanied him on his last journey to Eisleben, and left us a description of his closing days. He translated several of his and Melanchthon’s works.

The journey to Worms resembled a March of triumph, but clouded with warnings of friends and threats of foes. In Leipzig, Luther was honorably received by the magistrate, notwithstanding his enemies in the University. In Thuringia, the people rushed to see the man who had dared to defy the Pope and all the world.

At Erfurt, where he had studied law and passed three years in a monastic cell, he was enthusiastically saluted, and treated as "the hero of the gospel." Before he reached the city, a large procession of professors and students of his alma mater, headed by his friends Crotus the rector, and Eoban the Latin poet, met him. Everybody rushed to see the procession. The streets, the walls, and roofs were covered with people, who almost worshiped Luther as a wonder-working saint. The magistrate gave him a banquet, and overwhelmed him with demonstrations of honor. He lodged in the Augustinian convent with his friend Lange. On Sunday, April 7, he preached on his favorite doctrine, salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, and against the intolerable yoke of popery. Eoban, who heard him, reports that he melted the hearts as the vernal sun melts the snow, and that neither Demosthenes nor Cicero nor Paul so stirred their audiences as Luther’s sermon stirred the people on the shores of the Gera.350

During the sermon a crash in the balconies of the crowded church seared the hearers, who rushed to the door; but Luther allayed the panic by raising his hand, and assuring them that it was only a wicked sport of the Devil.351

In Gotha and Eisenach he preached likewise to crowded houses. At Eisenach he fell sick, and was bled; but a cordial and good sleep restored him sufficiently to proceed on the next day. He ascribed the sickness to the Devil, the recovery to God. In the inns, he used to take up his lute, and to refresh himself with music.

He arrived at Frankfurt, completely exhausted, on Sunday, April 14. On Monday he visited the high school of William Nesse, blessed the children and exhorted them "to be diligent in reading the Scriptures and investigating the truth." He also became acquainted with a noble patrician family, von Holzhausen, who took an active part in the subsequent introduction of the Reformation in that city.352

As he proceeded, the danger increased, and with it his courage. Before be left Wittenberg, the Emperor had issued an edict ordering all his books to be seized, and forbidding their sale.353  The herald informed him of it already at Weimar, and asked him, "Herr Doctor, will ye proceed?"  He replied, "Yes." The edict was placarded in all the cities. Spalatin, who knew the critical situation, warned him by special messenger, in the name of the Elector his patron, not to come to Worms, lest he might suffer the fate of Hus.354

Luther comforted his timid friends with the words: Though Hus was burned, the truth was not burned, and Christ still lives. He wrote to Spalatin from Frankfurt, that he had been unwell ever since he left Eisenach, and had heard of the Emperor’s edict, but that he would go to Worms in spite of all the gates of hell and the evil spirits in the air.355  The day after, he sent him from Oppenheim (between Mainz and Worms) the famous words: -

"I shall go to Worms, though there were as many devils there as tiles on the roofs."356

A few days before his death at Eisleben, he thus described his feelings at that critical period: "I was fearless, I was afraid of nothing; God can make one so desperately bold. I know not whether I could be so cheerful now."357 Mathesius says, with reference to this courage: "If the cause is good, the heart expands, giving courage and energy to evangelists and soldiers."

Sickingen invited Luther, through Martin Bucer, in person, to his castle Ebernburg, where he would be perfectly safe under the protection of friends. Glapio favored the plan, and wished to have a personal conference with Luther about a possible compromise and co-operation in a moderate scheme of reform. But Luther would not be diverted from his aim, and sent word, that, if the Emperor’s confessor wished, he could see him in Worms.

 Luther arrived in Worms on Tuesday morning, April 16, 1521, at ten o’clock, shortly before early dinner, in an open carriage with his Wittenberg companions, preceded by the imperial herald, and followed by a number of gentlemen on horseback. He was dressed in his monastic gown.358  The watchman on the tower of the cathedral announced the arrival of the procession by blowing the horn, and thousands of people gathered to see the heretic.359

As he stepped from the carriage, he said, "God will be with me."

The papal legate reports this fact to Rome, and adds that Luther looked around with the eyes of a demon.360  Cardinal Cajetan was similarly struck at Augsburg with the mysterious fire of the "profound eyes," and the "wonderful speculations," of the German monk.

Luther was lodged in the house of the Knights of St. John with two counselors of the Elector. He received visitors till late at night.361

The city was in a fever-heat of excitement and expectation.

 § 55. Luther’s Testimony before the Diet.

April 17 and 18, 1521.

See Lit. in § 53.

On the day after his arrival, in the afternoon at four o’clock, Luther was led by the imperial marshal, Ulrich von Pappenheim, and the herald, Caspar Sturm, through circuitous side-streets, avoiding the impassable crowds, to the hall of the Diet in the bishop’s palace where the Emperor and his brother Ferdinand resided. He was admitted at about six o’clock. There he stood, a poor monk of rustic manners, yet a genuine hero and confessor, with the fire of genius and enthusiasm flashing from his eyes and the expression of intense earnestness and thoughtfulness on his face, before a brilliant assembly such as he had never seen: the young Emperor, six Electors (including his own sovereign), the Pope’s legates, archbishops, bishops, dukes, margraves, princes, counts, deputies of the imperial cities, ambassadors of foreign courts, and a numerous array of dignitaries of every rank; in one word, a fair representation of the highest powers in Church and State.362  Several thousand spectators were collected in and around the building and in the streets, anxiously waiting for the issue.

Dr. Johann von Eck,363  as the official of the Archbishop of Treves, put to him, in the name of the Emperor, simply two questions in Latin and German,—first, whether he acknowledged the books laid before him on a bench (about twenty-five in number) to be his own; and, next, whether he would retract them. Dr. Schurf, Luther’s colleague and advocate, who stood beside him, demanded that the titles of those books be read.364  This was done. Among them were some such inoffensive and purely devotional books as an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer and of the Psalms.

Luther was apparently overawed by the August assembly, nervously excited, unprepared for a summary condemnation without an examination, and spoke in a low, almost inaudible tone. Many thought that he was about to collapse. He acknowledged in both languages the authorship of the books; but as to the more momentous question of recantation he humbly requested further time for consideration, since it involved the salvation of the soul, and the truth of the word of God, which was higher than any thing else in heaven or on earth.

We must respect him all the more for this reasonable request, which proceeded not from want of courage, but from a profound sense of responsibility.

The Emperor, after a brief consultation, granted him "out of his clemency" a respite of one day.

Aleander reported on the same day to Rome, that the heretical "fool" entered laughing, and left despondent; that even among his sympathizers some regarded him now as a fool, others as one possessed by the Devil; while many looked upon him as a saint full of the Holy Spirit; but in any case, he had lost much of his reputation.365

The shrewd Italian judged too hastily. On the same evening Luther recollected himself, and wrote to a friend: I shall not retract one iota, so Christ help me."366

On Thursday, the 18th of April, Luther appeared a second and last time before the Diet.

It was the greatest day in his life. He never appeared more heroic and sublime. He never represented a principle of more vital and general importance to Christendom.

On his way to the Diet, an old warrior, Georg von Frundsberg, is reported to have clapped him on the shoulder, with these words of cheer: "My poor monk, my poor monk, thou art going to make such a stand as neither I nor any of my companions in arms have ever done in our hottest battles. If thou art sure of the justice of thy cause, then forward in God’s name, and be of good courage: God will not forsake thee."367

He was again kept waiting two hours outside the hall, among a dense crowd, but appeared more cheerful and confident than the day before. He had fortified himself by prayer and meditation, and was ready to risk life itself to his honest conviction of divine truth. The torches were lighted when he was admitted.

Dr. Eck, speaking again in Latin and German, reproached him for asking delay, and put the second question in this modified form:, Wilt thou defend all the books which thou dost acknowledge to be thine, or recant some part?"

Luther answered in a well-considered, premeditated speech, with modesty and firmness, and a voice that could be heard all over the hall.368

After apologizing for his ignorance of courtly manners, having been brought up in monastic simplicity, he divided his books into three classes:369 (1) Books which simply set forth evangelical truths, professed-alike by friend and foe: these he could not retract. (2) Books against the corruptions and abuses of the papacy which vexed and martyred the conscience, and devoured the property of the German nation: these he could not retract without cloaking wickedness and tyranny. (3) Books against his popish opponents: in these he confessed to have been more violent than was proper, but even these he could not retract without giving aid and comfort to his enemies, who would triumph and make things worse. In defense of his books he could only say in the words of Christ:, If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why smitest thou me?"  If his opponents could convict him of error by prophetic and evangelical Scriptures, he would revoke his books, and be the first to commit them to the flames. He concluded with a warning to the young Emperor not to begin his reign by condemning the word of God, and pointed to the judgments over Pharaoh, the king of Babylon, and the ungodly kings of Israel.

He was requested to repeat his speech in Latin.370  This he did with equal firmness and with eyes upraised to heaven.

The princes held a short consultation. Eck, in the name of the Emperor, sharply reproved him for evading the question; it was useless, he said, to dispute with him about views which were not new, but had been already taught by Hus, Wiclif, and other heretics, and had been condemned for sufficient reasons by the Council of Constance before the Pope, the Emperor, and the assembled fathers. He demanded a round and direct answer, without horns."

This brought on the crisis.

Luther replied, he would give an answer "with neither horns nor teeth."371  From the inmost depths of his conscience educated by the study of the word of God, he made in both languages that memorable declaration which marks an epoch in the history of religious liberty: —

"Unless I am refuted and convicted by testimonies of the Scriptures or by clear arguments (since I believe neither the Pope nor the Councils alone; it being evident that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am conquered by the Holy Scriptures quoted by me, and my conscience is bound in the word of God: I can not and will not recant any thing, since it is unsafe and dangerous to do any thing against the conscience."372

So far the reports are clear and harmonious. What followed immediately after this testimony is somewhat uncertain and of less importance.

Dr. Eck exchanged a few more words with Luther, protesting against his assertion that Councils may err and have erred. "You can not prove it," he said. Luther repeated his assertion, and pledged himself to prove it. Thus pressed and threatened, amidst the excitement and confusion of the audience, he uttered in German, at least in substance, that concluding sentence which has impressed itself most on the memory of men: —

"Here I stand. [I can not do otherwise.]  God help me!  Amen."373

The sentence, if not strictly historical, is true to the situation, and expresses Luther’s mental condition at the time,—the strength of his conviction, and prayer for God’s help, which was abundantly answered. It furnishes a parallel to Galileo’s equally famous, but less authenticated, "It does move, for all that" (E pur si muove).

The Emperor would hear no more, and abruptly broke up the session of the Diet at eight o’clock, amid general commotion.

On reaching his lodgings, Luther threw up his arms, and joyfully exclaimed, "I am through, I am through?  "To Spalatin, in the presence of others, he said, "If I had a thousand beads, I would rather have them all cut off one by one than make one recantation."

The impression he made on the audience was different according to conviction and nationality. What some admired as the enthusiasm of faith and the strength of conviction, appeared to others as fanaticism and heretical obstinacy.

The Emperor, a stranger to German thought and speech,374  declared after the first hearing: "This man will never make a heretic of me." He doubted the authorship of the famous books ascribed to him.375  At the second hearing he was horrified at the disparagement of general Councils, as if a German monk could be wiser than the whole Catholic Church. The Spaniards and Italians were no doubt of the same opinion; they may have been repelled also by his lowly appearance and want of refined manners. Some of the Spaniards pursued him with hisses as he left the room. The papal legates reported that he raised his hands after the manner of the German soldiers rejoicing over a clever stroke, and represented him as a vulgar fellow fond of good wine.376  They praised the Emperor as a truly Christian and Catholic prince who assured them the next day of his determination to treat Luther as a heretic. The Venetian ambassador, otherwise impartial, judged that Luther disappointed expectations, and showed neither much learning, nor much prudence, nor was he blameless in life.377

But the German delegates received a different impression. When Luther left the Bishop’s palace greatly exhausted, the old Duke Erik of Brunswick sent him a silver tankard of Eimbeck beer, after having first drunk of it himself to remove suspicion. Luther said, "As Duke Erik has remembered me to-day, may the Lord Jesus remember him in his last agony." The Duke thought of it on his deathbed, and found comfort in the words of the gospel: "Whosoever shall give unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only, in the name of a disciple, he shall in no wise lose his reward." The Elector Frederick expressed to Spalatin the same evening his delight with Luther’s conduct: "How excellently did Father Martin speak both in Latin and German before the Emperor and the Estates!  He was bold enough, if not too much so."378  The cautious Elector would have been still better pleased if Luther had been more moderate, and not attacked the Councils. Persons of distinction called on him in his lodgings till late at night, and cheered him. Among these was the young Landgrave Philip of Hesse, who afterwards embraced the cause of the Reformation with zeal and energy, but did it much harm by his bigamy. After a frivolous jest, which Luther smilingly rebuked, he wished him God’s blessing.379

The strongest sympathizers with Luther were outside of the Diet, among the common people, the patriotic nobles, the scholars of the school of Erasmus, and the rising generation of liberal men. As he returned from the Diet to his lodgings, a voice in the crowd was heard to exclaim: "Blessed be the womb that bare this son." Tonstal, the English ambassador, wrote from Worms, that "the Germans everywhere are so addicted to Luther, that, rather than he should be oppressed by the Pope’s authority, a hundred thousand of the people will sacrifice their lives."380  In the imperial chambers a paper was found with the words: "Woe to the nation whose king is a child" (Eccl. x. 16).381  An uprising of four hundred German knights with eight thousand soldiers was threatened in a placard on the city hall; but the storm passed away. Hutten and Sickingen were in the Emperor’s service. "Hutten only barks, but does not bite," was a saying in Worms.

The papal party triumphed in the Diet. Nothing else could be expected if the historic continuity of the Latin Church and of the Holy German Roman Empire was to be preserved. Had Luther submitted his case to a general council, to which in the earlier stages of the conflict he had himself repeatedly appealed, the result might have been different, and a moderate reform of the mediaeval Church under the headship of the Pope of Rome might have been accomplished; but no more. By denying the infallibility of a council, he openly declared himself a heretic, and placed himself in opposition to the universal opinion, which regarded oecumenical Councils, beginning with the first of Nicaea in 325, as the ultimate tribunal for the decision of theological controversies. The infallibility of the Pope was as yet an open question, and remained so till 1870, but the infallibility of a general council was at that time regarded as settled. A protest against it could only be justified by a providential mission and actual success.

It was the will of Providence to prepare the way, through the instrumentality of Luther, for independent church-organizations, and the development of new types of Christianity on the basis of the word of God and the freedom of thought.

NOTE ON LUTHER’S SENTENCE: "HERE I STAND," ETC.

These words of Luther have been reported again and again, not only in popular books, but in learned histories, without a doubt of their genuineness. They are engraven on his monument at Worms.

But this very fact called forth a critical investigation of the Saxon Archivarius, Dr. C. A. H. Burkhardt (author of the learned work: Luther’s Briefwechsel), Ueber die Glaubwürdigkeit der Antwort Luthers: "Hie steh’ ich, ich kann nicht anders, Gott helff mir. Amen," in the "Theol. Studien und Kritiken" for 1869, III. pp. 517–531. He rejects all but the last three words (not the whole, as Janssen incorrectly reports, in his History, II. 165, note). His view was accepted by Daniel Schenkel (1870), and W. Maurenbrecher (Gesch. d. kath. Reform., 1880, I. 398). The latter calls the words even "Improper and unworthy," because theatrical, which we cannot admit.

On the other hand, Professor Köstlin, the biographer of Luther, has come to the rescue of the whole sentence in his Easter-program: Luther’s Rede in Worms, Halle, 1874; comp. his notes in the "Studien und Kritiken" for 1882, p. 551 sq., and his Martin Luther, I. 453, and the note, p. 800 sq. (second Ed. 1883). His conclusion was accepted by Ranke in the sixth Ed. of his Hist. of Germany (I. 336), and by Mönckeberg (pastor of St. Nicolai in Hamburg), who supports it by new proofs, in an essay, Die Glaubwürdigkeit des Lutherwortes in Worms, in the "Studien und Kritiken" for 1876, No. II. pp. 295–306.

The facts are these. In Luther’s own Latin notes which he prepared, probably at Worms, for Spalatin, there is no such sentence except the words, "God help me." The prayer which he offered loudly in his chamber on the evening before his second appearance before the Diet, and which some one has reported, concludes with the words, "Gott helfe mir, Amen!" (Walch, X. 1721; Erl. -Frkf. Ed., LXIV. 289 sq.). Spalatin in his (defective) notes on the acts of the Diet, preserved at Weimar (Gesammtarchiv, Reichtagsacten, 1521), and in his Annals (Ed. by Cyprian, p. 41), vouches likewise only for the words, "Gott helfe mir, Amen!"  With this agrees the original edition of the Acta Lutheri Wormatiae habita which were published immediately after the Diet (reprinted in the Frankf. ed. of the Opera Lat., vol. VI. p. 14, see second foot-note).

But other contemporary reports give the whole sentence, though in different order of the words. See the comparative table of Burkhardt, I.c. pp. 525–529. A German report (reprinted in the Erl. -Frkf. ed., vol. LXIV. p. 383) gives as the last words of Luther (in reply to Eck): "Gott kumm mir zu Hilf!  Amen. Da bin ich." The words "Da bin ich" (Here I am) are found also in another source. Mathesius reports the full sentence as coming from the lips of Luther in 1540. In a German contemporary print and on a fly-leaf in the University library of Heidelberg (according to Köstlin), the sentence appears in this order: "Ich kann nicht anders; hier steh’ ich; Gott helfe mir." In the first edition of Luther’s Latin works, published 1546, the words appear in the present order: "Hier steh’ ich," etc. In this form they have passed into general currency.

Köstlin concludes that the only question is about the order of words, and whether they were spoken at the close of his main declaration, or a little afterwards at the close of the Diet. I have adopted the latter view, which agrees with the contemporary German report above quoted. Kolde, in his monograph on Luther at Worms (p. 60), agrees substantially with Köstlin, and says: "Wir wissen nicht mehr, in welchem Zusammenhang diese Worte gesprochen worden sind, auch können sie vielleicht etwas anders gelautet haben; bei der herrschenden Unruhe hat der eine Berichterstatter den Ausspruch so, der andere ihn so verstanden; sicherlich drückten sie zu gleicher Zeit seine felsenfeste Überzeugung von der Wahrheit seines in sich gewissen Glaubens aus, wie das Bewusstsein, dass hier nur Gott helfen könne."

 § 56. Reflections on Luther’s Testimony at Worms.

Luther’s testimony before the Diet is an event of world-historical importance and far-reaching effect. It opened an intellectual conflict which is still going on in the civilized world. He stood there as the fearless champion of the supremacy of the word of God over the traditions of men, and of the liberty of conscience over the tyranny of authority.

For this liberty, all Protestant Christians, who enjoy the fruit of his courage, owe him a debt of gratitude. His recantation could not, any more than his martyrdom, have stopped the Reformation; but it would have retarded its progress, and indefinitely prolonged the oppressive rule of popery.

When tradition becomes a wall against freedom, when authority degenerates into tyranny, the very blessing is turned into a curse, and history is threatened with stagnation and death.382  At such rare junctures, Providence raises those pioneers of progress, who have the intellectual and moral courage to break through the restraints at the risk of their lives, and to open new paths for the onward march of history. This consideration furnishes the key for the proper appreciation of Luther’s determined stand at this historical crisis.

Conscience is the voice of God in man. It is his most sacred possession. No power can be allowed to stand between the gift and the giver. Even an erring conscience must be respected, and cannot be forced. The liberty of conscience was theoretically and practically asserted by the Christians of the ante-Nicene age, against Jewish and heathen persecution; but it was suppressed by the union of Church and State after Constantine the Great, and severe laws were enacted under his successors against every departure from the established creed of the orthodox imperial Church. These laws passed from the Roman to the German Empire, and were in full force all over Europe at the time when Luther raised his protest. Dissenters had no rights which Catholics were bound to respect; even a sacred promise given to a heretic might be broken without sin, and was broken by the Emperor Sigismund in the case of Hus.383

This tyranny was brought to an end by the indomitable courage of Luther.

Liberty of conscience may, of course, be abused, like any other liberty, and may degenerate into heresy and licentiousness. The individual conscience and private judgment often do err, and they are more likely to err than a synod or council, which represents the combined wisdom of many. Luther himself was far from denying this fact, and stood open to correction and conviction by testimonies of Scripture and clear arguments. He heartily accepted all the doctrinal decisions of the first four oecumenical Councils, and had the deepest respect for the Apostles’ Creed on which his own Catechism is based. But he protested against the Council of Constance for condemning the opinions of Hus, which he thought were in accordance with the Scriptures. The Roman Church itself must admit the fallibility of Councils if the Vatican decree of papal infallibility is to stand; for more than one oecumenical council has denounced Pope Honorius as a heretic, and even Popes have confirmed the condemnation of their predecessor. Two conflicting infallibilities neutralize each other.384

Luther did not appeal to his conscience alone, but first and last to the Scripture as he understood it after the most earnest study. His conscience, as he said, was bound in the word of God, who cannot err. There, and there alone, he recognized infallibility. By recanting, he would have committed a grievous sin.

One man with the truth on his side is stronger than a majority in error, and will conquer in the end. Christ was right against the whole Jewish hierarchy, against Herod and Pilate, who conspired in condemning him to the cross. St. Paul was right against Judaism and heathenism combined, "unus versus mundum;" St. Athanasius, "the father of orthodoxy,"  was right against dominant Arianism; Galileo Galilei was right against the Inquisition and the common opinion of his age on the motion of the earth; Döllinger was right against the Vatican Council when, "as a Christian, as a theologian, as an historian, and as a citizen," he protested against the new dogma of the infallibility of the Pope.385

That Luther was right in refusing to recant, and that he uttered the will of Providence in hearing testimony to the supremacy of the word of God and the freedom of conscience, has been made manifest by the verdict of history.

 § 57. Private Conferences with Luther. The Emperors Conduct.

On the morning after Luther’s testimony, the Emperor sent a message—a sort of personal confession of faith—written by his own hand in French, to the Estates, informing them, that in consistency with his duty as the successor of the most Christian emperors of Germany and the Catholic kings of Spain, who had always been true to the Roman Church, he would now treat Luther, after sending him home with his safe-conduct, as an obstinate and convicted heretic, and defend with all his might the faith of his forefathers and of the Councils, especially that of Constance.386

Some of the deputies grew pale at this decision; the Romanists rejoiced. But in view of the state of public sentiment the Diet deemed it expedient to attempt private negotiations for a peaceful settlement, in the hope that Luther might be induced to withdraw or at least to moderate his dissent from the general Councils. The Emperor yielded in spite of Aleander’s protest.

The negotiations were conducted chiefly by Richard von Greiffenklau, Elector and Archbishop of Treves, and at his residence. He was a benevolent and moderate churchman, to whom the Elector Frederick and Baron Miltitz had once desired to submit the controversy. The Elector of Brandenburg, Duke George of Saxony, Dr. Vehus (chancellor of the Margrave of Baden), Dr. Eck of Treves, Dean Cochlaeus of Frankfort,387  and the deputies of Strasburg and Augsburg, likewise took part in the conferences.

These men were just as honest as Luther, but they occupied the standpoint of the mediaeval Church, and could not appreciate his departure from the beaten track. The archbishop was very kind and gracious to Luther, as the latter himself admitted. He simply required that in Christian humility he should withdraw his objections to the Council of Constance, leave the matter for the present with the Emperor and the Diet, and promise to accept the final verdict of a future council unfettered by a previous decision of the Pope. Such a council might re-assert its superiority over the Pope, as the reformatory Councils of the fifteenth century had done.

But Luther had reason to fear the result of such submission, and remained as hard as a rock. He insisted on the supremacy of the word of God over all Councils, and the right of judging for himself according to his conscience.388  He declared at last, that unless convinced by the Scriptures or "clear and evident reasons," he could not yield, no matter what might happen to him; and that he was willing to abide by the test of Gamaliel, "If this work be of men, it will be overthrown; but if it is of God, ye will not be able to overthrow it" (Acts 5:38, 39).389

He asked the Archbishop, on April 25, to obtain for him the Emperor’s permission to go home. In returning to his lodgings, he made a pastoral visit to a German Knight, and told him in leaving: "To-morrow I go away."

Three hours after the last conference, the Emperor sent him a safe-conduct for twenty-one days, but prohibited him from writing or preaching on the way. Luther returned thanks, and declared that his only aim was to bring about a reformation of the Church through the Scriptures, and that he was ready to suffer all for the Emperor and the empire, provided only he was permitted to confess and teach the word of God. This was his last word to the imperial commissioners. With a shake of hands they took leave of each other, never to meet again in this world.

It is to the credit of Charles, that in spite of contrary counsel, even that of his former teacher and confessor, Cardinal Hadrian, who wished him to deliver Luther to the Pope for just punishment, he respected the eternal principle of truth and honor more than the infamous maxim that no faith should be kept with heretics. He refused to follow the example of his predecessor, Sigismund, who violated the promise of safe-conduct given to Hus, and ordered his execution at the stake after his condemnation by the Council of Constance.390  The protection of Luther is the only service which Charles rendered to the Reformation, and the best thing, in a moral point of view, he ever did.391  Unfortunately, he diminished his merit by his subsequent regret at Yuste.392  He had no other chance to crush the heretic. When he came to Wittenberg in 1547, Luther was in his grave, and the Reformation too deeply rooted to be overthrown by a short-lived victory over a few Protestant princes.

It is interesting to learn Aleander’s speculations about Luther’s intentions immediately after his departure. He reported to Rome, April 29, 1521, that the heretic would seek refuge with the Hussites in Bohemia, and do four "beastly things" (cose bestiali): 1, write lying Acta Wormaciensia, to incite the people to insurrection; 2, abolish the confessional; 3, deny the real presence in the sacrament; 4, deny the divinity of Christ.393

Luther did none of these things except the second, and this only in part. To prevent his entering Bohemia, Rome made provision to have him seized on the way.

 § 58. The Ban of the Empire. May 8 (26), 1521.

After Luther’s departure (April 26), his enemies had full possession of the ground. Frederick of Saxony wrote, May 4: "Martin’s cause is in a bad state: he will be persecuted; not only Annas and Caiaphas, but also Pilate and Herod, are against him." Aleander reported to Rome, May 5, that Luther had by his bad habits, his obstinacy, and his "beastly" speeches against Councils, alienated the people, but that still many adhered to him from love of disobedience to the Pope, and desire to seize the church property.

The Emperor commissioned Aleander to draw up a Latin edict against Luther.394  It was completed and dated May 8 (but not signed till May 26). On the same day the Emperor concluded an alliance with the Pope against France. They pledged themselves "to have the same friends and the same enemies," and to aid each other in attack and defense.

The edict was kept back till the Elector Frederick and the Elector of the Palatinate with a large number of other members of the Diet had gone home. It was not regularly submitted to, nor discussed and voted on, by the Diet, nor signed by the Chancellor, but secured by a sort of surprise.395  On Trinity Sunday, May 26, Aleander went with the Latin and German copy to church, and induced the Emperor to sign both after high mass, "with his pious hand." The Emperor said in French, "Now you will be satisfied."—"Yes," replied the legate in the same language, "but much more satisfied will be the Holy See and all Christendom, and will thank God for such a good, holy, and religious Emperor."396

The edict is not so long, but as turgid, bombastic, intolerant, fierce, and Cruel, as the Pope’s bull of excommunication.397  It gave legal force to the bull within the German Empire. It denounces Luther as a devil in the dress of a monk, who had gathered a mass of old and new heresies into one pool, and pronounces upon him the ban and re-ban.398 It commands the burning, and forbids the printing, publication, and sale, of his books, the sheltering and feeding of his person, and that of his followers, and directs the magistrates to seize him wherever he may be found, and to hand him over to the Emperor, to be dealt with according to the penal laws against heretics. At the same time the whole press of the empire was put under strict surveillance.399

This was the last occasion on which the mediaeval union of the secular empire with the papacy was expressed in official form so as to make the German emperor the executor of the decrees of the bishop of Rome. The gravamina of the nation were unheeded. Hutten wrote: "I am ashamed of my fatherland."400

Thus Luther was outlawed by Church and State, condemned by the Pope, the Emperor, the universities, cast out of human society, and left exposed to a violent death.

But he had Providence and the future on his side. The verdict of the Diet was not the verdict of the nation.

The departure of the Emperor through the Netherlands to Spain, where he subdued a dangerous insurrection, his subsequent wars with Francis in Italy, the victorious advance of the Turks in Hungary, the protection of Luther by the Elector Frederick, and the rapid spread of Protestant doctrines, these circumstances, combined to reduce the imperial edict, as well as the papal bull, to a dead letter in the greater part of Germany. The empire was not a centralized monarchy, but a loose confederation of seven great electorates, a larger number of smaller principalities, and free cities, each with an ecclesiastical establishment of its own. The love of individual independence among the rival states and cities was stronger than the love of national union; and hence it was difficult to enforce the decisions of the Diet against a dissenting minority or even a single recalcitrant member. An attempt to execute the edict in electoral Saxony or the free cities by military force would have kindled the flame of civil war which no wise and moderate ruler would be willing to risk without imperative necessity. Charles was an earnest Roman Catholic, but also a shrewd statesman who had to consult political interests. Even the Elector Albrecht of Mainz prevented, as far as he could, the execution of the bull and ban in the dioceses of Mainz, Magdeburg, and Halberstadt. He did not sign the edict as chancellor of the empire.401  Capito, his chaplain and private counselor, described him in a letter to Zwingli, Aug. 4, 1521, as a promoter of "the gospel," who would not permit that Luther be attacked on the pulpit. And this was the prelate who had been intrusted by the Pope with the sale of indulgences. Such a change had been wrought in public sentiment in the short course of four years.

The settlement of the religious question was ultimately left to the several states, and depended very much upon the religious preferences and personal character of the civil magistrate. Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg, the greater part of Northern Germany, also the Palatinate, Würtemberg, Nürnberg, Frankfurt, Strassburg, and Ulm, embraced Protestantism in whole or in part; while Southern and Western Germany, especially Bavaria and Austria, remained predominantly Roman Catholic. But it required a long and bloody struggle before Protestantism acquired equal legal rights with Romanism, and the Pope protests to this day against the Treaty of Westphalia which finally secured those rights.

 § 59. State of Public Opinion. Popular Literature.

K. Hagen: Der Geist der Reformation und seine Gegensätze. Erlangen, 1843. Bd. I. 158 sqq. Janssen, II. 181–197, gives extracts from revolutionary pamphlets to disparage the cause of the Reformation.

Among the most potent causes which defeated the ban of the empire, and helped the triumph of Protestantism, was the teeming ephemeral literature which appeared between 1521 and 1524, and did the work of the periodical newspaper press of our days, in seasons of public excitement. In spite of the prohibition of unauthorized printing by the edict of Worms, Germany was inundated by a flood of books, pamphlets, and leaflets in favor of true and false freedom. They created a public opinion which prevented the execution of the law.

Luther had started this popular literary warfare by his ninety-five Theses. He was by far the most original, fertile, and effective controversialist and pamphleteer of his age. He commanded the resources of genius, learning, courage, eloquence, wit, humor, irony, and ridicule, and had, notwithstanding his many physical infirmities, an astounding power of work. He could express the deepest thought in the clearest and strongest language, and had an abundant supply of juicy and forcible epithets.402  His very opponents had to imitate his German speech if they wished to reach the masses, and to hit the nail on the head. He had a genial heart, but also a most violent temper, and used it as a weapon for popular effect. He felt himself called to the rough work of "removing stumps and stones, cutting away thistles and thorns, and clearing the wild forests." He found aid and comfort in the severe language of the prophets. He had, as he says, the threefold spirit of Elijah,—the storm, the earthquake, and the fire, which subverts mountains and tears the rocks in pieces. He thoroughly understood the wants and tastes of his countrymen who preferred force to elegance, and the club to the dagger. Foreigners, who knew him only from his Latin writings, could not account for his influence.

Roman historians, in denouncing his polemics, are apt to forget the fearful severity of the papal bull, the edict of Worms, and the condemnatory decisions of the universities.403

His pen was powerfully aided by the pencil of his friend Lucas Cranach, the court-painter of Frederick the Wise.

Melanchthon had no popular talent, but he employed his scholarly pen in a Latin apology for Luther, against the furious decree of the Parisian theologasters."404  The Sorbonne, hitherto the most famous theological faculty, which in the days of the reformatory Councils had stood up for the cause of reform, followed the example of the universities of Louvain and Cologne, and denounced Luther during the sessions of the Diet of Worms, April 15, 1521, as an arch-heretic who had renewed and intensified the blasphemous errors of the Manichaeans, Hussites, Beghards, Cathari, Waldenses, Ebionites, Arians, etc., and who should be destroyed by fire rather than refuted by arguments.405  Eck translated the decision at once into German. Melanchthon dared to charge the faculty of Paris with apostasy from Christ to Aristotle, and from biblical theology to scholastic sophistry. Luther translated the Apology into German at the Wartburg, and, finding it too mild, he added to it some strokes of his "peasant’s axe."406

Ulrich von Hutten was almost equal to Luther in literary power, eloquence, wit, and sarcasm, as well as in courage, and aided him with all his might from the Ebernburg during his trial at Worms; but he weakened his cause by want of principle. He had previously republished and ridiculed the Pope’s bull of excommunication. He now attacked the edict of Worms, and wrote invectives against its authors, the papal legates, and its supporters, the bishops.407  He told the former how foolish it was to proceed with such impudence and violence against Luther, in opposition to the spirit of the age, that the time of revenge would soon come; that the Germans were by no means so blind and indifferent as they imagined; that the young Emperor would soon come to a better knowledge. He indignantly reminded Aleander of his shameful private utterance (which was also reported to Luther by Spalatin), that, if the Germans should shake off the papal yoke, Rome would take care to sow so much seed of discord among them that they would eat each other up. He reproached the archbishops and higher clergy for using force instead of persuasion, the secular magistrate instead of the word of Christ against Luther. He told them that they were no real priests; that they had bought their dignities; that they violated common morality; that they were carnal, worldly, avaricious; that they were unable or ashamed to preach the gospel which condemned their conduct, and that if God raised a preacher like Luther, they sought to oppress him. But the measure is full. "Away with you," he exclaims, "ye unclean hogs, away from the pure fountains!  Away with you, wicked traffickers, from the sanctuary!  Touch no longer the altars with your profane hands!  What right have ye to waste the pious benefactions of our fathers in luxury, fornication, and vain pomp, while many honest and pious people are starving?  The measure is full. See ye not that the air of freedom is stirring, that men, disgusted with the present state of things, demand improvement?  Luther and I may perish at your hands, but what of that?  There are many more Luthers and Huttens who will take revenge, and raise a new and more violent reformation."

He added, however, to the second edition, a sort of apologetic letter to Albrecht, the head of the German archbishops, his former friend and patron, assuring him of his continued friendship, and expressing regret that he should have been alienated from the protection of the cause of progress and liberty.

In a different spirit Hans Sachs, the pious poet-shoemaker of Nürnberg,408 wrote many ephemeral compositions in prose and poetry for the cause of Luther and the gospel. He met Luther at Augsburg in 1518, collected till 1522 forty books in his favor, and published in 1523 a poem of seven hundred verses under the title: "Die Wittenbergisch Nachtigall, Die man jetzt hört überall," and with the concluding words: "Christus amator, Papa peccator." It was soon followed by four polemical dialogues in prose.

Among the most popular pamphleteers on the Protestant side were a farmer named "Karsthans," who labored in the Rhine country between Strassburg and Basel, and his imitator, "Neukarsthans." Many pamphlets were anonymous or pseudonymous.

It is a significant fact, that the Reformation was defended by so many laymen. All the great German classics who arose in more recent times (Klopstock, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Uhland, Rückert), as well as philosophers (Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herbart, Lotze), are Protestants, at least nominally, and could not have grown on papal soil.

The newness and freshness of this fugitive popular literature called out by the Reformation, and especially by the edict of Worms, made it all the more effective. The people were hungry for intellectual and spiritual food, and the appetite grew with the supply.

The polemical productions of that period are usually brief, pointed, and aimed at the common-sense of the masses. They abound in strong arguments, rude wit, and coarse abuse. They plead the cause of freedom against oppression, of the laity against priestcraft and monkery. A favorite form of composition was the dialogue in which a peasant or a laboring-man defeats an ecclesiastic.

The Devil figures prominently in league with the Pope, sometimes as his servant, sometimes as his master. Very often the Pope is contrasted with Christ as his antipode. The Pope, says one of the controversialists, proclaimed the terrible bull of condemnation of Luther and all heretics on the day commemorative of the institution of the holy communion; and turned the divine mercy into human wrath, brotherly love into persecuting hatred, the very blessing into a curse.

St. Peter also appears often in these productions: he stands at the gate of heaven, examining priests, monks, and popes, whether they are fit to enter, and decides in most cases against them. Here is a specimen: A fat and drunken monk knocks at the gate, and is angry that he is not at once admitted; Peter tells him first to get sober, and laughs at his foolish dress. Then he catechises him; the monk enumerates all his fasts, self-mortifications, and pious exercises; Peter orders that his belly be cut open, and, behold! chickens, wild game, fish, omelets, wine, and other contents come forth and bear witness against the hypocrite, who is forthwith sent to the place of punishment.

The writer of a pamphlet entitled "Doctor Martin Luther’s Passion," draws an irreverent parallel between Luther’s treatment by the Diet, with Christ’s crucifixion: Luther’s entry into Worms is compared to Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, the Diet to the Sanhedrin, Archbishop Albrecht to Caiaphas, the papal legates to the Pharisees, the Elector of Saxony to Peter, Eck and Cochlaeus to the false witnesses, the Archbishop of Treves to Pilate, the German nation to Pilate’s wife; at last Luther’s books and likeness are thrown into the fire, but his likeness will not burn, and the spectators exclaim, "Verily, he is a Christian."

The same warfare was going on in German Switzerland. Nicolas Manuel, a poet and painter (died 1530), in a carnival play which was enacted at Berne, 1522, introduces first the whole hierarchy, confessing one after another their sins, and expressing regret that they now are to be stopped by the rising opposition of the people; then the various classes of laymen attack the priests, expose their vices, and refute their sophistries; and at last Peter and Paul decide in favor of the laity, and charge the clergy with flatly contradicting the teaching of Christ and the Apostles.409

These pamphlets and fugitive papers were illustrated by rude woodcuts and caricatures of obnoxious persons, which added much to their popular effect. Popes, cardinals, and bishops are represented in their clerical costume, but with faces of wolves or foxes, and surrounded by geese praying a Paternoster or Ave Maria. The "Passion of Christ and Antichrist" has twenty-six woodcuts, from the elder Lucas Cranach or his school, which exhibit the contrast between Christ and his pretended vicar in parallel pictures: in one Christ declines the crown of this world, in the other the Pope refuses to open the gate to the Emperor (at Canossa); in one Christ wears the crown of thorns, in the other the Pope the triple crown of gold and jewels; in one Christ washes the feet of his disciples, in the other the Pope suffers emperors and kings to kiss his toe; in one Christ preaches the glad tidings to the poor, in the other the Pope feasts with his cardinals at a rich banquet; in one Christ expels the profane traffickers, in the other the Pope sits in the temple of God; in one Christ rides meekly on an ass into Jerusalem, in the other the Pope and his cardinals ride on fiery steeds into hell.410

The controversial literature of the Roman-Catholic Church was far behind the Protestant in ability and fertility. The most popular and effective writer on the Roman side was the Franciscan monk and crowned poet, Thomas Murner. He was an Alsatian, and lived in Strassburg, afterwards at Luzern, and died at Heidelberg (1537). He had formerly, in his Narrenbeschwörung (1512) and other writings, unmercifully chastised the vices of all classes, including clergy and monks, and had sided with Reuchlin in his controversy with the Dominicans, but in 1520 he turned against Luther, and assailed his cause in a poetical satire: "Vom grossen lutherischen Narren wie ihn Doctor Murner beschworen hat, 1522."411

---

* Schaff, Philip, History of the Christian Church, (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.) 1997. This material has been carefully compared, corrected¸ and emended (according to the 1910 edition of Charles Scribner's Sons) by The Electronic Bible Society, Dallas, TX, 1998.

3⁰⁵  Her sad story is told by the contemporary historians Gomez, Peter Martyr, Zurita, and Sandoval (from whom the scattered account of Prescott is derived in his Ferdinand and Isabella, III. 94, 170 sqq., 212 sqq., 260 sqq.), and more fully revealed in the Simancas and Brussels documents. It has been ably discussed by several modem writers with reference to the unproved hypothesis of Bergenroth that she was never insane, but suspected and tortured (?) for heresy, and cruelly treated by Charles. But her troubles began long before the Reformation, and her melancholy disposition was derived from her grandmother. She received the extreme unction from priestly hands, and her last word was: "Jesus, thou Crucified One, deliver me." See Gustav Bergenroth (a German scholar then residing in London), Letters, Despatches, and State Papers relating to the negotiations between England and Spain preserved in the archives of Simancas and elsewhere. Suppl. to vol. I. and II., London, 1868; Gachard, Jeanne la Folle, Bruxelles, 1869; and Jeanne la Folle et Charles V., in the Bulletin of the Brussels Academy, 1870 and 1872; Rösler, Johanna die Wahnsinnige, Königin von Castilien, Wien, 1870, Maurenbrecher, Johanna die Wahnsinnige, in his "Studien und Skizzen zur Gesch. der Reformationszeit." Leipzig, 1874, pp. 75-98.

3⁰⁶  Martin (Histoire de France, VII. 496) says: "L’électeur Frédéric n’a vait ni la hardiesse ni le génie d’un tel rôle."

3⁰⁷  Martin, from his French standpoint, calls the controversy between Francis I. and Charles V. "la lutte de la nationalité française contre la monstrueuse puissance, issue des combinaisons artificielles de l’hérédité féodale, qui tend à l’asservissement des nationalités européennes." (Hist. de France, VIII., 2.)

3⁰⁸  Motley (I. 118) calls him "a man without a sentiment and without a tear." But he did shed tears at the death of his favorite sister Eleanore (Prescott, I. 324).

3⁰⁹  English translation, p. 157.

3¹⁰  Motley (I. 123) says, on the authority of the Venetian ambassador, Badovaro: "He was addicted to vulgar and miscellaneous incontinence." On the same authority he reports of Philip II.: "He was grossly licentious. It was his chief amusement to issue forth at night, disguised, that he might indulge in vulgar and miscellaneous incontinence in the common haunts of vice." (I. 145.)

3¹¹  So Shakespeare calls her, and praises her "sweet gentleness," "saintlike meekness,""wife-like government, obeying in commanding."

3¹²  The inscription on the tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella in the Capilla Real of the cathedral at Granada is characteristic: "Mahometice secte prostratores et heretice pervicacie extinctores Ferdinandus Aragonum et Helisabetha Castelle vir et uxor unanimes Catholici appellati Marmores clauduntur hoc tumulo." The sepulcher is wrought in delicate alabaster; on it are extended the life-size marble figures of the Catholic sovereigns; their faces are portraits; Ferdinand wears the garter, Isabella the cross of Santiago; the four doctors of the Church ornament the corners, the twelve apostles the sides. Under the same monument rest the ashes of their unfortunate daughter Joanna and her worthless husband. I have seen no monument which surpasses this in chaste and noble simplicity (unless it be that of King Frederick William III. and Queen Louisa at Charlottenburg), and none which is more suggestive of historical meditation and reflection.

3¹³ Actus fidei; auto-de-fé in Spanish; auto-da-fé

3¹⁴  Motley (Dutch Republic, I. 80) says: "Thousands and tens of thousands of virtuous, well-disposed men and women, who had as little sympathy with anabaptistical as with Roman depravity, were butchered in cold blood, under the sanguinary rule of Charles, in the Netherlands. In 1533, Queen Dowager Mary of Hungary, sister of the Emperor, Regent of the provinces, the ’Christian widow’ admired by Erasmus, wrote to her brother, that ’in her opinion, all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be prosecuted with such severity as that error might be at once extinguished, care being only taken that the provinces were not entirely depopulated.’ With this humane limitation, the ’Christian widow’ cheerfully set herself to superintend as foul and wholesale a system of murder as was ever organized. In 1535, an imperial edict was issued at Brussels, condemning all heretics to death; repentant males to be executed with the sword, repentant females to be buried alive, the obstinate, of both sexes, to be burned. This and similar edicts were the law of the land for twenty years, and rigidly enforced."

3¹⁵  "Vine, y vi, y Dios vencio." But it was hardly a battle. Ranke (vol. IV. 377): "Es war keine Schlacht, sondern ein Ansprengen auf der einen, ein Auseinanderstieben auf der anderen Seite; in einem Augenblicke war alles vollendet." He says of the Emperor (p. 376): "Wie ein einbalsamirter Leichnam, wie ein Gespenst rückte er gegen sie [die Protestanten) an."

3¹⁶  Ch. VI., in Simpson’s translation, p. 91 sq.

3¹⁷ Autobiography, p. 19. On p. 73 sqq. he complains of Clement VII. and Paul III., on account of their violation of promise to convoke such a council. He does not conceal his hatred of Paul III.

3¹⁸  Comp. Maurenbrecher, Die Kirchenreformation in Spanien, in his "Studien und Skizzen." pp. 1-40, and his Geschichte der katholischen Reformation (Nördlingen, 1880), vol. I., pp. 37-55. Maurenbrecher shows that there were two reformation-currents in the sixteenth century, one proceeding from Spain, and led by Charles V., which aimed at a restoration of the mediaeval Church in its purity and glory; the other proceeding from Germany, and embodied in Luther, which aimed at an emancipation of the human mind from the authority of Rome, and at a reconstruction of the Church on the inner religiosity of the individual.

3¹⁹  April 28, 1521; in De Wette, I. 589-594.

3²⁰  In his Autobiography (ch. X., 151 sqq.) Charles speaks of the siege and capitulation of Wittenberg, but says nothing of a visit to Luther’s grave, nor does he even mention his name. I looked in vain for an allusion to the fact in Sleidan, and Lindner (in his extensive Appendix to Seckendorf, from 1546 to 1555). Ranke ignores it, though he is very full on this chapter in Charles’s history (vol. IV. 378 sqq.).

3²¹  "Ein Moment volt Schicksal und Zukunft!" says Ranke (V. 295)."Da war der mächtige Kaiser, der bisher die grossen Angelegenheiten der Welt verwaltet hatte; von denen, die ihm zunächst standen, beinahe der Generation, die ihn umgab, nahm er Abschied. Neben ihm erschienen die Männer, denen die Zukunft gehörte, Philipp II. und der Prinz von Oranien, in denen sich die beiden entgegengesetzten Directionen repräsentirten, die fortan um Weltherrschaft kämpfen sollten."

3²²  Sandoval, II. 597 sqq.; Gachart, Analectes belgiques, 87; Prescott, Philip the Second, I. 10 sqq.; Ranke, V. 293 sqq. Prescott calls this abdication one of the most remarkable scenes in history.

3²³  The negotiations with Ferdinand and the German Diet are detailed by Ranke, V. 297 sqq.

3²⁴  He regretted that, from regard to his son, he had not married again. Ranke, V. 297.

3²⁵  It is often miscalled Saint Yuste, or St. Justus, even by Robertson in Book XII., Eng. ed. III. 294; Amer. ed. III. 226, etc.; and more recently by Dr. Stoughton, Spanish Reformers, Lond., 1883, p. 168. Yuste is not named after a saint, but after a little stream. The convent was founded in 1404, and its proper name is El monasterio de San Geronimo de Yuste. It lies on the route from Madrid to Lisbon, but is somewhat difficult of access. It was sacked and almost destroyed by the French soldiers under Soult, 1809. The bedroom of Charles, and an overgrown walnut-tree under whose shade he used to sit and muse, are still shown. Yuste is now in possession of the Duke of Montpensier. See descriptions in the works of Stirling, Mignet, and Prescott, above quoted, and by Ford in Murray’s Handbook of Spain, I. 294 (sixth edition).

3²⁶  By Sandoval, Strada, and by his most elaborate historian, Dr. Robertson, who says: "There he buried, in solitude and silence, his grandeur, his ambition, together with those projects which, during almost half a century, had alarmed and agitated Europe, filling every kingdom in it, by turns, with the terror of his arms, and the dread of being subdued by his power." Sepulveda, who visited Charles in his retreat, seems to be the only early historian who was aware of his deep interest in public affairs, so fully confirmed by the documents.

3²⁷  "Aus den Legaten seines Testamentes lernt man die Mitglieder derselben kennen,—eine ganze Anzahl Kammerdiener, besondere Diener für die Fruchtkammer, Obstkammer, Lichtbeschliesserei, Aufbewahrung der Kleider, der Juwelen, meist Niederländer, jedoch unter einem spanischen Haushofmeister, Louis Quixada. Der Leibarzt und eine Apotheke fehlten nicht." Ranke, V. 305. The codicil of Charles, executed a few days before his death, specifies the names and vocations of these servants. Sandoval and Gachart give the list, the latter more correctly, especially in the orthography of Flemish names.

3²⁸  These and other articles of furniture and outfit are mentioned in the inventory. See Sterling, Pichot, and Prescott, I. 302 sqq.

3²⁹  Prescott, l.c., I. 311.

3³⁰  The story is told with its later embellishments by Robertson and many others. The papers of Simancas, and the private letters of the Emperor’s major-domo (Quixada) and physician, are silent on the subject; and hence Tomas Gonzalez, Mignet (1854 and 1857), and Maurenbrecher ("Studien und Skizzen." 1874, p. 132, note) reject the whole as a monkish fiction. But the main fact rests on the testimony of a Hieronymite monk of Yuste, who was present at the ceremony, and recorded the deep impression it made; and it is confirmed by Sandoval, who derived his report directly from Yuste. A fuller account is given by Siguença, prior of the Escorial, in his general history of the Order of St. Jerome (1605); and by Strada, who wrote a generation later, and leaves the Emperor in a swoon upon the floor. Stirling, Pichot, Juste, Gachard (1855), Prescott (Phil. II., Vol. I., 327 sqq.), and Ranke (Vol. V., 309 sq.), accept the fact as told in its more simple form by the oldest witness. It is quite consistent with the character of Charles; for, as Prescott remarks (p. 332), "there was a taint of insanity in the royal blood of Castile."

3³¹  Commonly called Dr. Cazalla. See on him Dr. Stoughton, The Spanish Reformers, p. 204 sq.

3³²  Gachard, II. 461. Ranke, V. 308. Prescott, I. 325 sq.

3³³  His long trial is told by Prescott, Philip the Second, I. 337, 437 sqq.; and by Stoughton, The Spanish Reformers, pp. 185 sqq.

3³⁴ Deutsche Gesch., vol. V. 311.

3³⁵  The convent was robbed of its richest treasures by the French invaders in 1808, and by the Carlists in 1837. Some of the finest pictures were removed to the museum of Madrid. There still remains a considerable library; the books are richly bound, but their gilt backs are turned inside. The Rev. Fritz Fliedner, an active and hopeful Protestant evangelist in Madrid, with whom I visited the Escorial in May, 1886, bought there the ruins of a house and garden, which was built and temporarily occupied by Philip II. (while the palace-monastery was in process of construction), and fitted it up for an orphan-home, in which day by day the Scriptures are read, and evangelical hymns are sung, in the Spanish tongue.

3³⁶  Worms is 26 miles S. S. E. of Mainz (Mayence or Mentz, the ancient Moguntiacum, the capital of Rhenish Hesse since 1815), and has now over 20,000 inhabitants, about one-half of them Protestants, but in the beginning of the seventeenth century it had 70,000. It was almost destroyed under Louis XIV. (1683). The favorite German wine, Liebfrauenmilch, is cultivated in its neighborhood. H. Boos, Urkundenbuch der Stadt Worms, Berlin, 1886.

3³⁷  See description of the celebration by Dr. Friedrich Eich, Gedenkblätter, Worms, 1868; and his book on the controversy about the locality of the Diet, In welchem Locale stand Luther zu Worms vor Kaiser und Reich? Leipzig, 1863. He decides for the Bishofshof (against the Rathhaus).

3³⁸  "Multo deteriores haereticos." The new papal bull of condemnation, together with a brief to the Emperor, arrived in Worms the 10th of February. Aleander addressed the Diet three days after, on Ash Wednesday. Ranke, I. 329. Köstlin, I., 422 sq.

3³⁹  Luther published this bull afterwards with biting, abusive, and contemptuous comments, under the title, Die Bulla vom Abendfressen des allerheiligsten, Herrn, des Papsts. In Walch XV. 2127 sqq. Merle d’Aubigné gives characteristic extracts, Bk. VII. ch. 5.

3⁴⁰  Janssen, who praises him very highly, remarks (II. 144): "Um der Häresie Einhalt zu thun, hielt Aleander die Verbrennung der lutherischen Bücher für ein überaus geeignetes Mittel." But I can not see why he says (p. 142) that Aleander prided himself on being "a German." Aleander was born in Italy, hated the Germans, and died in Rome.

3⁴¹  See Brück’s conversations with Glapio in Förstemann, I., pp. 53, 54. Erasmus and Hutten regarded him as a crafty hypocrite, who wished to ruin Luther. Strauss agrees, Ulrich von Hutten, p. 405. But Maurenbrecher, (Studien, etc., pp. 258 sqq., and Gesch. der kath. Ref., I. 187 sqq.) thinks that Glapio presented the program of the imperial policy of reform. Janssen, II., 153 sq., seems to be of the same opinion.

3⁴²  See the list in Walch, XV., 2058 sqq.

3⁴³  Luther, in a letter to Spalatin (Nov. 23, 1520, In De Wette I. 523), in a moment of indignation expressed a wish that Hutten might have intercepted (utinam —Intercepisset) the legates, but not murdered, as Romanists (Janssen, twice, II. 104, 143) misinterpret it. See Köstlin, I. 411, and note on p. 797.

3⁴⁴  See Aleander’s dispatches in Brieger, l.c. I. pp. 119 sqq.; Strauss, Ulrich von Hutten, 4th ed., pp. 395 sqq.; and Ullmann, Franz von Sickingen (Leipzig, 1872).

3⁴⁵  Aleander reports (April 13) that Luther was painted with the Holy Spirit over his head (el spirito santo sopra it capo, come to depingono). Brieger, I. 139.

3⁴⁶  The letters of safe-conduct are printed in Walch, XV., 2122-2127, and Förstemann, Neues Urkundenbuch, I., 61 sq. In the imperial letter signed by Albert, Elector and Archbishop of Mayence and Chancellor of the Empire, Luther is addressed as "honorable, well-beloved, pious" (Ehrsamer, Geliebter, Andächtiger; in the Latin copy, Honorabilis, Dilecte, Devote), much to the chagrin of the Romanists.

3⁴⁷  Letter of Dec. 21, 1520 (De Wette, I., 534, 536): "Ego vero, si vocatus fuero, quantum per me stabit, vel aegrotus advehar, si sanus venire non possem. Neque enim dubitari fas est, a Domino me vocari, si Caesar vocat. ... Omnia de me praesumas praeter fugam et palinodiam: fugere ipse nolo, recantare multo minus. Ita me comfortet Dominus Jesus."

3⁴⁸  On the Emser controversy see Erl. Frkf. ed., vol. XXVII.

3⁴⁹  His proper name was Lancelot Politi. See Lämmer, Vortridentinische Theologie, p. 21, and Burkhardt, Luther’s Briefwechsel, p. 38. Luther calls him "insulsus et stolidus Thomista," in a letter to Spalatin, March 7, 1521 (De Wette, I. 570).

3⁵⁰  A full description of the reception at Erfurt, with extracts from the speech of Crotus and the poems of Eoban, is given by Professor Kampschulte (a liberal Catholic historian), in his valuable monograph, Die Universität Erfurt, vol. II. 95-100."It seems," he says, "that the nation at this moment wished to make every effort to assure Luther of his vocation. The glorifications which he received from the 2d to the 16th of April no doubt contributed much to fill him with that self-confidence which he manifested in the decisive hour. Nowhere was he received more splendidly than at Erfurt."

3⁵¹  "Seid still," he said, "liebes Volk, es ist der Teufel, der richtet so eine Spiegelfechterei an; seid still, es hat keine Noth." Some of his indiscreet admirers called this victory over the imaginary Devil the first miracle of Luther. The second miracle, they thought, he performed at Gotha, where the Devil played a similar trick in the church, and met with the same defeat.

3⁵²  His brief sojourn at Frankfurt, and his contact with the Holzhausen family, is made the subject of an interesting historical novel: Haman von Holzhausen. Eine Frankfurter Patriziergeschichte nach Fainilienpapieren erzählt von M. K. [Maria Krummacher]. Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1885. See especially chap. XX., pp. 253, sqq.

3⁵³  The edict is dated March 10. See Burkhardt, Luther’s Briefwechsel (1866), p. 38, who refers to Spalatin’s MS. Seidemann dates the letter from March 2. Ranke, in the sixth ed. (1881), I. 333, says that it was published March 27, on the doors of the churches at Worms. Luther speaks of it in his Eisleben report, and says that the edict was a device of the Archbishop of Mainz to keep him away from Worms, and tempt him to despise the order of the Emperor. Works, Erl. Frankf. ed., LXIV. 367.

3⁵⁴  Notwithstanding this danger, Janssen thinks (II. 158) that it required no "special courage" for Luther to go to Worms.

3⁵⁵  April 14 (De Wette, I. 587): "Christus vivit, et intrabimus Wormatiam invitis omnibus portis inferni et potentatibus aeris" (Eph. 2:2).

3⁵⁶  Spalatin reports the saying thus: "Dass er mir Spalatino aus Oppenheim gen Worms schrieb: ’Er wollte gen Worms wenn gleich so viel Teufel darinnen wären als immer Ziegel da wären’ " (Walch, XV. 2174). A year afterwards, in a letter to the Elector Frederick, March 5, 1522 (De Wette, II 139), Luther gives the phrase with this modification: "Er [the Devil] sah mein Herz wohl, da ich zu Worms einkam, dass, wenn ich hätte gewusst, dass so viel Teufel auf mich gehalten hätten, als Ziegel auf den Dächern sind, wäre ich dennoch mitten unter sie gesprungen mit Freuden." In the verbal report he gave to his friends at Eisleben in 1546 (Erl. Frankf. ed., vol. LXIV. p. 368): "Ich entbot ihm [Spalatin]wieder: ’Wenn so viel Teufel zu Worms wären als Ziegel auf den Dächern, noch [doch]wollt ich hinein.’"

3⁵⁷  Ibid: "Denn ich war unerschrocken, fürchtete mich nichts; Gott kann einen wohl so toll machen. Ich weiss nicht, ob ich jetzt auch so freudig wäre."

3⁵⁸  See Luther’s picture of that year, by Cranach, in the small biography of Köstlin, p. 237 (Scribner’s ed.). It is very different from those to which we are accustomed.

3⁵⁹  "Nun fuhr ich," says Luther (LXIV. 368), "auf einem offenen Wäglein in meiner Kappen zu Worms ein. Da kamen alle Leute auf die Gassen und wollten den Mönch D. Martinum sehen."

3⁶⁰  Aleander to Vice-Chancellor Medici, from Worms, April 16: "Esso Luther in descensu currus versis huc et illuc demoniacis oculis disse: ’Deus erit pro me.’ " Brieger, I. 143.

3⁶¹  "Tutto il mondo," writes Aleander in the same letter, "went to see Luther after dinner."

3⁶²  Walch, XV. 2225-2231, gives a list of over two hundred members of the Diet that were present.

3⁶³  Not to be confounded with the more famous Dr. Eck of Ingolstadt. Aleander, who lodged with him on the same floor, calls him "homo literatissimo" and "orthodoxo," who had already done good service in the execution of the papal demands at Treves. Brieger, I. 146. In a dispatch of April 29, he solicits a present for him from the Roman See. ("Al official de Treveri un qualche presente sarebbe util," etc., p. 174). Froude, in his Luther (pp. 32, 33, 35), confounds the Eck of Treves with the Eck of Ingolstadt, Aleander with Cajetan, and makes several other blunders, which spoil his lively description of the scene at Worms.

3⁶⁴  "Legantur tituli librorum," he cried aloud.

3⁶⁵  Letter to Vice-Chancellor Medici, Worms, April 17, 1521 (in Brieger, l.c. p. 147): "El pazzo era entrato ridendo et coram Cesare girava il capo continuamente quà et là, alto e basso; poi net partir non parea così allegro. Quì molti di quelli et [=etiam]che lo favoreggiavano, poi che l’hanno visto, l’hanno existimado chi pazzo, chi demoniaco, molti altri santo et pieno di spiritu santo; tutta volta ha perso in ogni modo molta reputatione della opinione prima."

3⁶⁶  April 17, to John Cuspinianus, an imperial counsellor. See De Wette, I. 587 sq.

3⁶⁷  "Mönchlein, Mönchlein, du gehst jetzt einen Gang, dergleichen ich und mancher Oberster auch in unserer allerernstesten Schlachtordnung nicht gethan haben," etc. The saying is reported by Mathesius (who puts it on the second day of trial, not on the first, as Köstlin and others), by Spangenberg and Seckendorf (Leipzig ed. of 1694, vol. I. 156, in Latin and German).

3⁶⁸  "Respondit Doctor Martinus et ipse latine et germanice, quanquam suppliciter, non clamose, ac modeste, non tamen sine Christiana animositate et constantia."Acta, etc. (Op. Lat., VI. 9). He began with the customary titles: "Allerdurchlauchtigster, grossmächtigster Kaiser, Durchlauchtige Churfürsten, gnädigste und gnädige Herren!" These fulsome titles are used to this day in Germany, as if a king or emperor were mightier than the Almighty I

3⁶⁹  In his report at Eisleben, he calls the three classes briefly Lehrbücher, Zankbücher, and Disputationes.

3⁷⁰  So Luther says himself (in his Eisleben report of the Worms events, in the Erl. Frkf. ed., vol. LXIV. 370): "Dieweil ich redete, begehrten sie von mir, ich sollt es noch einmal wiederholen mit lateinischen Worten ... Ich wiederholte alle meine Worte lateinisch. Das gefiel Herzog Friedrich, dem Churfürsten überaus wohl." Spalatin confirms this in Epitome Actorum Lutheri, etc.: "Dixit primo germanice, deinde latine." Other reports put the Latin speech first; so the Acta Luth. (in the Erl. Frkf. ed. of Op. Lat., VI. 9: respondit D. Martinus et ipse latine et germanice). Köstlin follows the latter report (I. 445, 451), and overlooked the testimony of Luther, who must have known best.

3⁷¹  In the German text, "ein unstüssige und unbeissige Antwort" (vol. LXIV. 382); i.e., an answer neither offensive nor biting—with reference, no doubt, to his concluding warning.

3⁷²  We give also the German and Latin texts."Weil denn Eure Kaiserliche Majestät und Eure Gnaden eine schlichte Antwort begehren, so will ich eine Antwort ohne Hörner und Zähne geben diesermassen: ’Es sei denn, dass ich durch Zeugnisse der Schrift oder durch helle Gründe überwunden werde—denn ich glaube weder dem Papst, noch den Konzilien allein, dieweil am Tag liegt, dass sie öfters geirrt und sich selbst widersprochen haben,—so bin ich überwunden durch die von mir angeführten heiligen Schriften, und mein Gewissen ist gefangen in Gottes Wort; widerrufen kann ich nichts und will ich nichts, dieweil wider das Gewissen zu handeln unsicher und gefährlich ist.’ " See Köstlin, I. 452. The oldest reports vary a little in the language. Some have scheinbarliche und merkliche Ursachen for helle Gründe, and at the close:"dieweil wider das Gewissen zu handeln beschwerlich und unheilsam, auch gefährlich ist." Werke (Erl. Frkf. ed.), vol. LXIV. 382.
The Latin text as given in the Acta Lutheri Wormatiae habita is as follows: "Hic Lutherus: Quando ergo serenissima Majestas vestra Dominationesque vestrae simplex responsum petunt, dabo illud, neque cornutum, neque dentatum, in hunc modum: ’Nisi convictus fuero testimoniis Scripturarum, aut ratione evidente (nam neque Papae, neque Conciliis solis credo, cum constet eos errasse saepius, et sibi ipsis contradixisse), victus sum Scripturis a me adductis captaque est conscientia in verbis Dei; revocare neque possum neque volo quidquam, cum contra conscientiam agere neque tutum sit, neque integrum.’ " Opera Lat. (Frankf. ed.), vol. VI. 13 sq.

3⁷³  "Hier steh’ ich. [Ich kann nicht anders.] Gott helfe mir! Amen." The bracketed words cannot be traced to a primitive source. See the critical note at the close of this section.

3⁷⁴  The little German he knew was only the Platt-Deutsch of the Low Countries. He always communicated with his German subjects in Latin or French, or by the mouth of his brother Ferdinand.

3⁷⁵  Aleander (l.c. p. 170): "Cesar palam dixit et sepissime postea repetiit, che mai credera che l’ habbii composto detti libri." The mixing of Latin and Italian is characteristic of the Aleander dispatches. He was inclined to ascribe the authorship of the greater part of Luther’s books to Melanchthon, of whom he says that he has "un belissimo, ma malignissimo ingegno (p. 172).

3⁷⁶  Aleander and Caracciolo to the Vice-Chancellor Medici, April 19, 1521 (Brieger, I. 153): "Martino uscito fuora della sala Cesarea alzò la mano in alto more militum Germanorum, quando exultano di un bel colpo di giostra." In a letter of April 27 (l.c. p. 166), they call Luther "il venerabile ribaldo," who before his departure drank in the presence of many persons "molte tazze di malvasia, della qual ne è forte amoroso." The charge of intemperance is repeated in a dispatch of April 29 (p. 170): "la ebrietà, alla quale detto Luther è deditissimo." That Luther used to drink beer and wine according to the universal custom of his age, is an undoubted fact; but that he was intemperate in eating or drinking, is a slander of his enemies. Melanchthon, who knew him best, bears testimony to his temperance. See below, the section on his private life.

3⁷⁷  Contarenus ad Matthaeum Dandalum, quoted by Ranke, I. 336.

3⁷⁸  Walch, XV. 2246.

3⁷⁹  The interview as related by Luther (Walch, XV. 2247; Erlangen-Frankfurt edition, LXIV. 373) is characteristic of this prince, and foreshadows his future conduct. "Der Landgraf von Hessen kam zu Worms erstlich zu mir. Er war aber noch nicht auf meiner Seiten, und kam in Hof geritten, ging zu mir in mein Gemach, wollte mich sehen. Er war aber noch sehr jung, sprach: Lieber Herr Doctor, wie geht’s? Da antwortete ich: Gnädiger Herr, ich hoff, essoll gut werden. Da sagte er: Ich höre, Herr Doctor, ihr lehret, wenn ein Mann alt wird und seiner Frauen nicht mehr Ehepflicht leisten kann, dass dann die Frau mag einen anderen Mann nehmen, und lachte, denn die Hofräthe hatten’s ihm eingeblasen. Ich aber lachte auch und sagte: Ach nein, gnädiger Herr, Euer Fürstlich Gnad sollt nicht also reden. Aber er ging balde wieder von mir hinweg, gab mir die Hand und sagte: Habt ihr Recht, Herr Doctor, so helfe euch Gott."

3⁸⁰  In Fiddes Life of Wolsey, quoted by Ranke, I. 337, note.

3⁸¹  Ranke (I. 337) says "in den kaiserlichen Gemächern." Other reports say that these words were placarded in public places at Worms.

3⁸²  The Devil sometimes tells the truth. So Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust, when he excuses the aversion of the student to the study of jurisprudence, and says with a wicked purpose:—

"Es erben sich Gesetz’ und Rechte

 Wie eine ew’ge Krankheit fort;

 Sie schleppen von Geschlecht sich zum Geschlechte

 Und schleichen sacht von Ort zu Ort.

 Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohlthat Plage;

 Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist !

 Vom Rechte, das mit uns geboren ist,

 Von dem ist, leider! nie die Frage ."

3⁸³  Dr. (Bishop) Hefele discusses this case at length from the Roman Catholic standpoint, in his Conciliengeschichte, vol. VII. (1869), pp. 218 sqq. He defends Sigismund and the Council of Constance on the ground that a salvus conductus protects only against illegal violence, but not against the legal course of justice and deserved punishment, and that its validity for the return of Hus to Bohemia depended on his recantation. But no such condition was expressed in the letter of safe-conduct (as given by Hefele, p. 221), which grants Hus freedom to come, stay, and return (transire, morari et redire libere). Sigismund had expressly promised him "ut salvus ad Bohemiam redirem " (p. 226). Such a promise would have been quite unnecessary in case of his recantation.

3⁸⁴  See my Church Hist., vol. IV. 500 sqq.; and Creeds of Christendom, vol. I. 169 sqq.

3⁸⁵  Döllinger’s declaration of March 28, 1871, for which he was excommunicated, April 17, 1871, notwithstanding his eminent services to the Roman Catholic Church as her most learned historian, bears some resemblance to Luther’s declaration at Worms. See Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, I. 195 sqq.

3⁸⁶  Walch, XV. 2235-2237.

3⁸⁷  John Cochlaeus (his original name was Dobeneck; b. 1479, at Wendelstein in Franconia, d. at Bresau, 1552) was at first as a humanist an admirer of Luther, but turned against him shortly before the Diet of Worms, and became one of his bitterest literary opponents. He went to Worms unasked, and wished to provoke him to a public disputation. He was employed by the Archbishop of Treves as theological counsel, and by Aleander as a spy. Aleander paid him ten guilders "per sue spese" (see his dispatch of April 29 in Brieger, I. 175). Cochlaeus wrote about 190 books, mostly polemical against the Reformers, and mostly forgotten. Luther treated him with great contempt, and usually calls him "Doctor Rotzlöffel," also "Kochlöffel." See Works, Erl. ed., XXXI. 270 sq., 276 sq., 302 sq.; LXII. 74, 78. Otto, Johann Cochlaeus, der Humanist, Breslau, 1874; Felician Gess, Johannes Cochlaeus, der Gegner Luthers, Oppeln, 1886, IV. 62 pages.

3⁸⁸  "Gnädiger Herr," he said to the Archbishop of Trier, "ich kann alles leiden, aber die heilige Schrift kann ich nicht übergeben." And again: "Lieber will ich Kopf und Leben verlieren, als das klare Wort Gottes verlassen."

3⁸⁹  See the reports on these useless conferences, in Walch, XV. 2237-2347, 2292-2319; Cochlaeus, Com. de Actis Lutheri, and his Colloquium cum Luthero Wormatiae habitum; the report of Hieronymus Vehus, published by Seidemann, in the "Zeitschrift für histor. Theol.," 1851, p. 80 sqq.; and the report of Aleander in Brieger, I. 157-160. Ranke says (I. 332), one might almost be tempted to wish that Luther had withdrawn his opposition to the councils, and contented himself for the present with the attack upon the abuses of the papacy, in which he had the nation with him; but he significantly adds, that the power of his spirit would have been broken if it had bound itself to any but purely religious considerations. "Der ewig freie Geist bewegt sich in seinen eigenen Bahnen."

3⁹⁰  It is asserted by Gieseler and Ranke (I. 341) that the Council gave official sanction to this maxim by declaring with regard to Hus: "Nec aliqua sibi [ei] fides aut promissio de jure naturali, divino vel humano fuerit in praejudicium catholicae fidei observanda." Von der Hardt, Conc. Const. IV. 521; Mansi, Concil. XXVII. 791. Hefele (Conciliengeschichte, VII. 227 sq.) charges Gieseler with sinning against the Council and against truth itself, and maintains that this decree, which is only found in the Codex Dorrianus at Vienna, was merely proposed by a member, and not passed by the Council. But the undoubted decree of the 19th Sess., Sept. 23, 1415, declares that a safe-conduct, though it should be observed by him who gave it as far as he was able, affords no protection against the punishment of a heretic if he refuses to recant; and the fact remains that Hus was not permitted to return, and was burned in consequence of his condemnation by the Council and during its session, July 6, 1415. Aeneas Sylvius (afterwards Pope Pius II.) bears to him and Jerome of Prague the testimony: "Nemo philosophorum tam forti animo mortem pertulisse traditur quam isti incendium." The traditional prophecy of Hus: "Now ye burn a goose (anser; Hus in Bohemian means goose); but out of my ashes shall rise a swan (cygnus, Luther), which you shall not be able to burn," is not authentic, and originated in Luther’s time as a vaticinium post eventum.

3⁹¹  Ranke says (vol. V. 308): "Es ist die universalhistorisch grösste Handlung Karls V., dass er damals das gegebene Wort höher stellte als die kirchliche Satzung."

3⁹²  See above, p. 283.

3⁹³  Brieger, I. 169 sqq. Aleander says in support of the fourth item, that the Lutheran "wretch," Martin Butzer (he calls him Putzer), had already fallen into the diabolical Arian heresy, as he had been told by the Emperor’s confessor, Glapio, who had a conference with Butzer and Sickingen.

3⁹⁴  Aleander reports, May 5: "Poi me fù commesso per Cesar et el Consilio (the imperial council),che io stesso facesse el decreto, con quelle più justificationi si potesse, acciochè il popolo se contentasse."

3⁹⁵  "Das Edict," says Ranke (i. 342), "ward den Ständen nicht in ihrer Versammlung vorgelegt; keiner neuen Deliberation ward es unterworfen; unerwartet, in der kaiserlichen Behausung bekamen sie Kunde davon, nachdem man nichts versäumt, um sie guenstig zu stimmen; die Billigung desselben, die nicht einmal formell genannt werden kann, ward ihnen durch eine Art von Ueberraschung abgewonnen."

3⁹⁶  Dispatch of May 26. Brieger, I. 224. The edict appeared in print on the following Thursday, May 30, and on Friday the Emperor left Worms.

3⁹⁷  Aleander himself calls it more terrible than any previous edict (cosi horribile quanto mai altro editto), June 27, 1521. Brieger, I. 241. Ranke says (I. 343): "Es war so scharf, so entschieden wie möglich."

3⁹⁸ Die Acht und Aberacht. The Acht is the civil counterpart of the ecclesiastical excommunication and excludes the victim from all protection of the law. The Aberacht or Oberacht follows if the Acht remains without effect. It is in the German definition die völlige Fried- und Rechtslos- oder Vogelfrei-Erklärung. The imperial Acht is called the Reichsacht.

3⁹⁹  See the edict in full in Walch, XV. 2264-2280. It was published officially in Latin and German, and translated into the languages of the Dutch and French dominions of Charles. Aleander himself, as he says, prepared the French translation.

4⁰⁰  Letter to Pirkheimer, May 1, 1521: "Me pudere incipit patriae."Opera II. 59.

4⁰¹  Janssen, II. 208 sq.: "Albrecht musste sich beugen vor Luther, der Primus vor dem excommunicirten Mönch, welcher ihm mit Enthuellungen drohte."

4⁰² Kraftwörter, as the Germans call them.

4⁰³  Janssen says (II. 181 and 193): "Den Ton für die ganze damalige polemische Literatur gabLuther an, wie durch seine früheren Schriften, so auch durch die neuen, welche er von der Wartburg aus in die Welt schickte." Then he quotes a number of the coarsest outbursts of Luther’s wrath, and his disparaging remarks on some books of the New Testament (the Eusebian Antilegomena), all of which, however, are disowned by the Lutheran Church, and more than counterbalanced by his profound reverence for, and submission to, the undoubted writings (the Homologumena). See § 6, pp. 16 sqq.

4⁰⁴  "Adversus furiosum Parisiensium theologastrorum Decretum pro Luthero Apologia," 1521. In the "Corpus Reformat.," vol. I. 398-416. A copy of the original edition is in the Royal Library at Berlin. An extract, in Carl Schmidt’s Philipp Melanchthon, pp. 55 sqq.

4⁰⁵ Determinatio Theologorum Parisiensium super Doctrina Lutheriana. "Corp. Reform." I. 366-388.

4⁰⁶  "Mein lieber Philipp," he says, "hat ihnen [den groben Pariser Eseln] wohl meisterlich geantwortet, hat sie aber doch zu sanft angerührt und mit dem leichten Hobel überlaufen; ich sehe wohl, ich muss mit der Bauernaxt über die groben Blöcke kommen." At the same time there appeared an anonymous satire against the Paris theologians, in the style of the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum. See Schmidt, l.c. p. 58.

4⁰⁷ In Hieron. Aleandrum, et Marinum Caracciolum Oratores Leonis X. apud Vormaciam Invectivae singulae.—In Cardinales, episcopos et Sacerdotes, Lutherum Vormaciae oppugnantes, Invectiva.—Ad Carolum Imp. pro Luthero exhortatoria. See Strauss, Ulrich v. Hutten, pp. 397 sqq.

4⁰⁸  Characteristic for his poetry is the well-known rhyme (which is, however, not found in his works):—

"Hans Sachs war ein Schuh-

 Macher und Poet dazu."

A new edition of his poems appeared at Stuttgart, 1870 sqq. He figures prominently in Kaulbach’s picture of the Reformation.

4⁰⁹  See Grüneisen’s Nicolaus Manuels Leben und Werke (1837), pp. 339-392.

4¹⁰ Passional Christi und Antichristi, mit Luther’s Nachrede, 1521, in the Frkf. ed., LXIII., 240-248. Luther accompanied the pictures with texts.

4¹¹  Newly edited by H. Kurz, Zürich, 1848. Janssen makes much use of this poem (II. 123-128, 190, 415, 416). Murner thus describes the Protestant attack on the sacraments:—

"Die Mess, die sol nim gelten

Im Leben noch im Tod.

 Die Sacrament sie schelten,

 Die seien uns nit Not.

 Fünf hont sie gar vernichtet,

 Die andern lon sie ston,

 Dermassen zugerichtet,

 Dass sie auch bald zergon ."

Of Luther’s doctrine of the general priesthood of the laity he says:—

"Wir sein all Pfaffen worden,

 Beid Weiber und die Man,

 Wiewol wir hant kein Orden

 Kein Weihe gnomen an."