by Simon Winder
The issue of belief is permanently dramatized in the town of Dordrecht. It may have just been an accident of timing, but when I was wandering around it there seemed throughout its streets to be nothing but workmen fixing roads, roofs, doorways and quaysides. It was as though the lopsided, ancient nature of much of the town meant that its inhabitants were in a permanent rear-guard action to prevent the whole wonky ensemble from falling into the Old Maas River. The town’s odd ancientness was summed up by a higgledy-piggledy house with patched-on classical features – little Corinthian pilasters and a design in the entablature featuring a beaver, some fruit and a very strange emblem of two burly mermen with their suffused and muscular tails intertwined. It was completely impossible not to see this as an early-modern thumbs-up for male love, albeit of a specialized kind, but I fear it may just have been some tedious allegory of different rivers joining their courses in the town.
In any event, Dordrecht is famous for its painters and for its bogglingly large, oil-tanker of a church which looms over the town like some permanent, ancient moral reproach. It was near this church in 1618, at the wonderfully named Arquebusiers’ Shooting Range, that an international congress was opened, the Synod of Dort as it is known in English, to define and confirm the nature of Protestantism. It was held during the Twelve Years Truce and there were high hopes that with sufficient prayerfulness and intellectual rigour a united Protestant position could at last be found. There was great anxiety that the Catholic Council of Trent (1545–63) had, through agreement on doctrine and discipline, successfully re-launched Catholicism. Newspapers and sermons were full of horror stories about, for example, the successful sweeping away of Protestants from much of Austria by the resurgent Habsburgs: churches blown up, books burned and the corpses of those buried as heretics dug up and thrown into the streets.
The Dordrecht church remains as a sort of enormous bell jar preserving the atmosphere of that synod. Its whitewashed walls and mostly clear glass express a sober aesthetic which would have been matched by the relentlessly black-and-white clothing of the delegates (in contrast to the Fellini-esque Council of Trent, where it must have been sometimes hard to hear yourself speak over the sound of swishing silks). The synod was made up of ten colleges – one for each Dutch province, one for theology faculties and one for the Walloon church, meaning French-speaking Protestant refugees from the south. There were representatives from England, Scotland, Hesse, Bremen and the Palatinate (the last a Calvinist bastion that would be shortly torn to pieces in the Thirty Years War). Louis XIII would not allow French Protestants (Huguenots) to attend so their bench was left symbolically empty.
The tragedy of the synod lay in the nature of Protestantism. Inspired by Calvin, the attendees felt as much scorn for Luther as for the Pope – and this split implied (or made explicit really) the likelihood of further splits, potentially limitless splits. For the synod the persecution of Lutherans was almost as significant as that of Catholics. Indeed, once the Universal Church was broken, Western Europe stepped into a world painfully lacking any sort of playground monitor – or rather one featuring several rival playground monitors who were intent on killing one another. The Netherlands was already a mass of forcibly discarded beliefs. In many ways the long period in which Dutch forms of Protestantism had developed, generally in wartime and accompanied by waves of many thousands of refugees, had destroyed Catholicism, but not necessarily replaced it with anything else. There was a horror at the idea that the expulsion of the Pope had led just to forms of indifferentism rather than to true, reformed black-and-white fervour. In the 1590s, it was reckoned that of Utrecht’s thirty churches only three were now in use. The Truce had allowed a Cologne-based Catholic mission to be set up which trained courageous priests to re-infiltrate the Netherlands, in the same way that the English College in Douai smuggled priests into England. The Truce also allowed Catholics in the eastern borderlands of Gelderland and Overijssel simply to walk east into Kleve and Münster where they could worship as they wished.
The stakes at the synod were therefore high, but with the chance of compromise limited by the nature of intellectual religious belief, where compromise simply meant failure and the destruction of the soul. Several delegates made clear they would only attend on the basis that their own beliefs would be confirmed. At the heart of the synod’s problems lay what proved to be a cataclysmic split between two views on predestination: one in which there was no human action that could alter the nature of punishment or reward in the afterlife – the idea, rather wonderfully, that the Last Judgement was not a future event, but a timeless process; the other that there were indeed actions in this life that could influence whether, later on, one was damned or saved. This split was named, after their most articulate spokesmen, Gomarism and Arminianism, and came near to destroying the Republic.
The Great Church preserves a lovely nineteenth-century model of the synod, a simplified interior filled with six-inch-high dolls in white ruffs with individually designed beards. The one epochal, positive decision taken by the life-size versions was to create a new Bible in Dutch, to be re-translated directly from the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. The form of Dutch to be used would take elements of Brabants and Hollands and was instrumental in creating a standardized written Dutch which moved it decisively further away from German. These biblical projects were more than purely religious in their impact – creating skills, interests and habits of mind which could be applied to translating any other language as well, with crucial intellectual, trade and colonial implications.
In the end, while everyone could agree on the whitewash and plain glass, they could not agree on the nature of our fate as humans. The Arminians were allowed to make their case at the synod but were derided. The political implications were huge, as Arminianism was embraced by van Oldenbarnevelt, architect of the Truce, and many of the ‘regents’, effectively the civic ruling class. On the face of it the Truce should have been popular, but many observers made the point that it was a betrayal of all those still crushed beneath the heel of Catholic Spain and, while it allowed a breathing space for the Dutch to prepare for a renewal of the fighting, it also did so for the Spanish. What was meant to be an intelligent response to a nightmare conflict that had already gone for over forty years turned in the view of many into a period of rot and lethargy. The Arminians at the synod were forced to agree to desist from preaching or writing. In response van Oldenbarnevelt tried to create a militia to defend Holland. The Stadtholder Maurice – who in his personal life acknowledged his own adherence to the doctrine of ‘total depravity’ with a cheerfulness that appalled the austere Gomarists – nonetheless supported them and ended the stalemate by marching through Utrecht and arresting and then executing van Oldenbarnevelt at The Hague. This bloodthirsty spasm made the Dutch Reformed Church in the form understood at Dordrecht into the national religion. It was also one of several moments in 1618–19 which signalled a new and terrible recklessness. The Reformation, it could be argued, had failed. Most of Europe remained Catholic and any religion based on a fervent sense of its own truth cannot live with such failure – it cannot be both true and almost completely unsuccessful. The actions at Dordrecht and The Hague proved to be part of a far wider and, as it proved, ruinous decision by a generation of men, both Catholic and not, to use military means to end this stalemate.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘A harvest of joys’ » Fencers and soap-boilers » Elizabeth and her children » Uncle Toby’s hobby-horse » ‘Too late to be ambitious’
‘A harvest of joys’
One way in which all history books fail is that they provide accounts of events which suppose that they are being read by an enlightened outsider. This also creates a shape for events which steers the reader’s attitude – so if you are engrossed by a book on the Thirty Years War and are reading about the events of 1645 you know that there are three years to go. But for those who were living the events there were no means of understanding what would happen next – nobody would fight on
until 1648 so as to make it a round thirty years. So the shape of historical events is unavailable to those living them, but also unavailable was the status of being that genuinely enlightened outsider. Consequences, good and bad, needless or inevitable, could only be guessed at, and yet seem glaringly obvious to the modern-day history reader. When Charles V agreed to the Peace of Augsburg with the Schmalkaldic League in 1555, only Europe’s most lukewarm cynic, or those devoted to a purely private faith, would have seen it as a permanent settlement. The Peace recognized Lutheranism as a legitimate form of Christianity, but not Calvinism. It tried to pin down for good the form of faith in each territory, but such near neutralism was always unacceptable to many. But the stakes were so much higher than this. Belief in this period was, by definition, incompatible with coexistence. Belief was not a form of party dress – gorgeously coloured and elaborate if Catholic; a lot less fun if Calvinist. It was built in that the other faiths had to be both completely wrong and wicked. Luther’s ideas were not meant to provide an alternative to existing Christianity, but to replace it – and its failure to do so as well as the creation of other forms of reform left Europe in a state of bad-tempered chaos.
Charles V’s abdication led to a drastic change in Europe’s structure, with the major sources of power switching to Madrid and to the borders of the Ottoman Empire, leaving the western Empire suddenly as a backwater. Charles was always going off to Tunis or Bologna and while he may have been born a Fleming he soon lost any local affection. The long and incoherent reign of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague particularly rotted the Empire’s structure – because of Rudolf’s own prolonged bouts of disengagement, his vicious arguments with his siblings and the dismaying Long Turkish War which ground on through the 1590s and 1600s (and which, of course, was not to start with viewed as Long by its generals). To use a playground metaphor, the extended period of distraction and lack of engagement by Rudolf was rather like in a primary school where all the teachers have disappeared: for a while everyone keeps on playing nicely – but after a few hours they start spontaneously developing slave labour, concubinage and human sacrifice.
Every territory in the Empire viewed the Peace as a mere interlude. Those answering to the Pope recovered their bounce with the soul-searching and creative Council of Trent. The different Reform strands were at odds with one another and people were baffled and fearful at their lack of success. There was also the grand theatre provided by the Dutch–Spanish war, which was understood as a fight between Calvinism and Catholicism, even if this was only partly true. All this meant that any religious changes within the Empire would generate bad ripples. A lot of these changes were personal and effectively just accidental.
One with enormous future implications occurred in the Palatinate. The fervently religious and Catholic Frederick of Simmern had been converted to Lutheranism by his wife Maria. When he became Elector of the Palatinate he sat in Heidelberg in a quagmire of theological earnestness, mulling and disputing with various no doubt grim theologians before deciding that he would move on and become a Calvinist. The early 1560s were then devoted to iconoclasm, mass sackings and friendly overtures to the Dutch. Frederick ignored Imperial threats, but was hamstrung by his own son Ludwig being an equally convinced Lutheran who waited patiently for his father’s death (in 1576) to shift everyone back. Ingeniously though, Frederick carved out a small territory for his younger son, Johann Casimir, around the town of Kaiserslautern which could remain Calvinist. Ludwig on coming to the throne duly cleared out the Calvinists but died young, leaving one nine-year-old son (his other sons had died before their first birthdays), Frederick IV, for whom Johann Casimir became regent, and who was therefore raised a Calvinist. As can be imagined, these years saw a certain amount of chaos in Heidelberg, with organs being moved in and out of churches and congregations having to pretend they didn’t know various hymns and then suddenly remembering them again. The Palatinate’s Elector therefore became, on pretty shambolic grounds, the great beacon for Calvinist hopes in the western Empire, with devastating results for the next generation.
The sheer earnestness of the Palatinate was missing, further down the Rhine, in Bonn, capital of the Catholic Electorate of Cologne. Here theological dispute was reduced to farce, when Elector Gebhard, Archbishop of Cologne, fell in love. There was a precedent for this and the Augsburg agreements permitted priests who wished to marry to resign and change faith. There never seems any suggestion that Gebhard was motivated by anything other than his desire for Agnes von Mansfeld-Eisleben, but he announced to the world that he was not just going to become a Calvinist but stay on as the archbishop of a large, ancient, entirely Catholic territory. The mayhem caused by the marriage in 1583 led to his Electorate being torn to pieces by rival armies. He was hard to defend because he was such an idiot, but the Cologne War was too good an opportunity for others to further the Protestant presence on the Rhine. It also had a profound impact on the other Electors – the Palatinate, Saxony and Brandenburg were all Protestant and if Cologne could also be brought over then the Catholics would become a minority of the seven, with profound implications for the next Emperor’s election. Everyone poured in, creating a ghastly sneak preview of the Thirty Years War – including, in a particularly sinister touch, the intervention of thousands of Spanish troops, a key moment in demonstrating that specifically German religious issues could no longer be treated just as Imperial business. Gebhard and Agnes inevitably lost and fled to Strasbourg, leaving Bonn and its hinterland as Catholic then as it is today. The one physical monument to his folly is the distinctive wrecked castle in Bad Godesberg. Blown up during the Cologne War, its garrison massacred and its bleak outline left as a reminder to later generations of the stark cost of disobedience, it is now a luxury hotel.
These were all preliminaries, among others, to the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the catastrophe that is generally reckoned to have killed a third of all German-speakers, many through plague. The conventional view is that it was an almost surreally awful stalemate, with round after round of battles, each triumph petering out and each country humiliated in turn: just a meaningless sequence of actions by out-of-control gangs of horsemen with cheap armour, floppy hats, lank hair and VD. The war would loom large in the nineteenth century as a historical morality tale about German weakness – with the Empire shown as a futile and divided arena trampled over by more powerful outsiders. It became an argument for the creation of the new German Empire in 1871, which would through its unity and strength ensure that such horrors never happened again. But I am struck by the degree to which arguments around the war being uniquely futile can be seen as merely Protestant special pleading: the war was in fact decisive and definitive. It ensured that many areas of Central Europe became Catholic again; it confirmed the Catholic Habsburg stranglehold over the Empire; it ended political Protestantism in France; and it ensured the failure of the Protestant project – corralled into a small group of north-west European countries. Meanwhile Jesuit and other Catholic missionaries spread around the world, from Peru to China, as celebrated by Rubens’s vast super-Catholic canvases. The war only took so long because a series of misguided Protestant ‘paladins’ – the Elector of the Palatinate, the King of Denmark, the King of Sweden – took turns to overplay their hand and be ejected. Eventual realpolitik French intervention saved some Protestant areas, but only because the French wished to mess up the Habsburgs and ensure they did not become too powerful – France, after all, was itself Catholic and the Protestant states it rescued were simply tools to be briefly picked up and then chucked aside.
To describe the entire course of the Thirty Years War here would be to launch into some fifty to sixty confusing pages. It stemmed from the catastrophic decision, described in the next section, by the young Calvinist Elector Palatine Frederick V (the son of Frederick IV) to accept the throne of Bohemia from a cabal of Protestant nobles – a challenge in all kinds of intolerable ways to the imperial Habsburg dynasty which, unnoticed by Frederick, had unfortunate
ly just revived and refreshed itself after a long period of weakness. Much of the fighting happened in the central and eastern Empire, but one of the war’s grim features was the way that wayward, exhausted and unpaid armies were constantly on the hunt for undevastated land – for food, fodder and loot. Almost every area would, perhaps after twenty or more years of security, suddenly find itself the focus of appalling savagery, disasters immortalized in the Lorrainer Jacques Callot’s brilliant if horrible engravings Great Miseries of the War and Grimmelshausen’s remarkable novel Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668). Grimmelshausen wrote it in old age, but in some ways it was closely based on his experience in the Imperial army, not least during the fighting around the Black Forest in 1637 and as a garrison soldier in the Rhine fortress of Offenburg. He lived around Strasbourg, becoming very famous and staying alive long enough to witness the French invasion of 1676.
