by Eamon Duffy
One country which had seemed impregnable to the new doctrines was England. Henry VIII was ardently orthodox, and had rapidly mobilised the best theologians in England to confute Luther and his associates. He himself published an able attack on Luther’s teaching on the sacraments, and was rewarded by Leo X with the title ‘Defender of the faith’. Through the 1510s and 1520s, Erasmus had publicised the triumphant reign of Catholic Humanists like Thomas More at Henry’s court. Henry, however, had no son, and wanted to set aside his Spanish wife Catherine of Aragon in order to marry one of the court ladies, Ann Boleyn. The current marriage was a dynastic one, designed to unite Spain and England, and Catherine was the widow of Henry’s elder brother Arthur. Canon law forbade marriage to a deceased brother’s wife, so to marry her Henry had needed a papal dispensation, which he got from Julius II. There were, however, conflicting biblical texts, some of which seemed to forbid a man from marrying his brother’s widow, others which seemed to allow it. If scripture did indeed forbid such a marriage, could the Pope permit it? Theologians disagreed. Henry now announced that he believed that the prohibition against such a marriage was God’s law revealed in scripture, not merely that of the Church, and from the written law of God there could be no dispensation, not even from the Pope. His and Catherine’s inability to have a son was God’s judgement on an illicit union; the papal dispensation was clearly void.
The case was a knotty one, though on balance the best theological opinion was against the King. Henry, however, seems to have believed sincerely what he said, and popes had accommodated princes on thinner grounds than this before. Through the 1520s Cardinal Wolsey worked to get Henry his divorce, and the Vatican must have considered it, for the archives contain a draft papal bull granting it. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, however, the Sack of Rome changed everything. After 1527 Clement was the Emperor’s prisoner, and Charles was the favourite nephew of Catherine of Aragon. There was now no question of granting Henry what he wanted. Rome first stalled, and then refused. Henry turned on the Church in England, asserted his own supremacy over it, and repudiated the papacy. England, still, outside London and a few provincial cities, relatively untouched by Protestant ideas, was lost to the papacy.
III THE COUNTER-REFORMATION
The choice of a new pope is often a signal of what has been disapproved of in the preceding regime, and the death of Clement VII might have been expected to produce another pope in the mould of Hadrian VI. The election of Alessandro Farnese as Pope Paul III (1534–49), however, seemed a determined gesture in the face of growing religious crisis towards the departed glories of Renaissance Rome. In some ways he was the obvious choice. At sixty-seven he was the oldest of the cardinals, and the most experienced. Enormously charming, he was also enormously intelligent, and Clement VII had repeatedly urged that he should be elected as his successor. Despite a long and highly effective career in papal diplomacy, he had managed to remain on friendly terms with both France and the empire, and neither Francis I nor Charles V objected to his election.
Yet there was plenty about him to worry earnest men. The first Roman nobleman to be elected pope since Martin V, he was emphatically a product of old corruption. His ecclesiastical career had got off to a flying start because his sister Giulia was Alexander VI’s last mistress – Farnese was known in sarcastic Roman circles as ‘Cardinal Petticoat’. To the end of his life he had Mass celebrated in his chapel annually for the repose of Alexander’s soul. As cardinal he himself kept a mistress, by whom he had four children, and on the Via Giulia he built himself one of the most magnificent palaces in Rome, a treasure-house of art and opulence.
His early months as pope set a pattern he was to maintain for the whole of his long reign. His first cardinals were his two teenage grandsons, and he established a succession of cardinal nephews in splendour at the Palazzo Farnese. Like Alexander VI, he carved chunks out of the Papal States for his sons. After the tight-fisted regime of Clement VII, Rome erupted into firework displays, masked balls, risqué plays. He revived the Carnival in 1536, and it grew every year in extravagance, with elaborate floats laden with scenes from classical mythology, so massive they had to be drawn by teams of buffalo. The Pope delighted the people of Rome with lavish entertainments, bullfights and horse-races through the streets and piazzas. Deliciously shocked commentators noted that the Pope’s dinner-guests included women, that he entertained his sons and their wives at banquets in the Vatican, that he unblushingly chose the third anniversary of his coronation for the christening of one of his grandsons (though he discreetly absented himself from the ceremony). He was an ardent believer in astrology, timing consistories, audiences, even the issue of bulls, according to the most auspicious arrangements of the stars.
Paradoxically, it was this unlikely Pope who gave the internal reform of the Catholic Church the impetus and direction it had till now so patently lacked. For all his worldliness and charm, he had himself been touched by the forces of reform. He had taken the decrees of the Fifth Lateran Council seriously, implementing them in his diocese of Parma, working (through a deputy) for an improvement in clerical standards. In 1513 he had ended his liaison with his mistress, and, though many curial cardinals were content to remain in minor orders all their lives, in 1519 he took the highly unusual step of seeking ordination to the priesthood. From that point onwards, despite the magnificence and display, he was associated with the party of reform.
At his election, Paul III knew very little about the state of Germany (a fair indicator of the lack of seriousness with which it had been treated under his predecessor). One of his earliest actions was to summon the Papal Nuncio from Vienna to brief him on what needed to be done. As a result, he became convinced that the call for a council could no longer be ignored. Against strong opposition from the cardinals, who feared that Conciliar reform was all too likely to begin with them, Paul began to press both the Emperor and the King of France to help convene such a council. It was a fraught issue, however. The Lutherans would not attend a papal council meeting on Italian soil, or presided over by the Pope. The Emperor wanted the Council to tackle practical reform, leaving him to negotiate a doctrinal settlement with his rebellious Protestant subjects. The Pope wanted the Council to tackle both doctrine and practical reform, and insisted it must be under papal presidency. Charles desperately needed a council to heal the internal divisions of Germany, but France thought that these divisions kept Charles usefully busy, and unable to attack France, and was quite happy to see them continue. Proposal after proposal for a council was vetoed by one side or another, and it was not until December 1545 that the Pope succeeded in launching the Council at Trent, in the Italian Alps, acceptable to Germans because nominally in imperial territory.
In the meantime, Paul maintained the forward pace of reform by a series of remarkable promotions into the cardinalate. One of the first was the devout Venetian layman Gasparo Contarini, who had undergone a conversion experience very like Luther’s in 1510, and who had become the key figure in devout Humanist circles in Italy. His elevation was intended as a clear signal of seriousness about the reform question. Under Contarini’s guidance Paul drew to Rome a remarkable circle of reformers, all of whom he made cardinals. They included Reginald Pole, Henry VIII’s cousin: he was another devout Humanist who shared many of Luther’s convictions about the nature of salvation and the need for reform. Paul also promoted Bishop Gian Matteo Giberti, a curial administrator and Humanist scholar who had undergone a profound personal conversion after the Sack of Rome, and had become a model reforming Bishop of Verona, and another Humanist, the former papal secretary Jacopo Sadoleto, Bishop of Carpentras. In contrast to these intellectuals was Giampietro Caraffa, a sixty-year-old Neapolitan nobleman who had been Archbishop of Brindisi and who had served as papal nuncio in England, Flanders and Spain. Summoned to Rome by Hadrian IV to help in reform, in 1525 he had renounced his various bishoprics, and had helped found the Theatines, an austere association of devout noblemen who embraced a
life of poverty and apostolic service through the ordained priesthood.
This extraordinary ‘ministry of all the talents’ was shaped into a Reform Commission, to produce a report on the ills of the Church and to suggest remedies. Not a single member of the Curia was included. Its report, the Consilium de Emendenda Ecclesia, presented to the Pope in March 1537, was dynamite. In the bluntest of terms, it laid the blame for the ills of the Church, including the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, squarely on the papacy, cardinals and hierarchy. It listed the evils of the Church, from papal sales of spiritual privileges, curial stockpiling of benefices, heretical or pagan teaching in universities, down to such matters as the ignorance of country curates or the poor spiritual direction in convents of women. It lamented the corruptions of the religious orders, recommended that all but the strictly observant religious orders should be abolished, and that novices in slack houses should be removed at once before they could be contaminated. This report was extremely unwelcome to the Curia, who did their best to block it. A copy was leaked to the press, however. In 1538 Luther published a German translation, with lipsmacking introduction and notes, and the resulting bad publicity meant that the report was shelved. The tide of reform, however, was too strong now to be turned back.
It was not a tide which flowed neatly in one direction. Contarini and Pole shared an understanding of reform which extended beyond the Church’s practices to her doctrines, On the question of ecclesiastical authority and the sacraments, they believed that Luther was deeply and sinfully wrong. On the fundamental question of the nature of ‘justification’, the salvation of the sinner by faith in Christ rather than by good works, however, they were certain he was right, and was recalling the Church to her ancient faith. As Cardinal Pole declared, ‘Heretics are not heretics in everything.’ They therefore hoped and worked for reconciliation with the Lutherans. By contrast, Cardinal Caraffa believed absolutely in the urgent need for moral, institutional and spiritual reform in the Church, but rejected any approach to Luther’s teaching as rank heresy. Churchmen might sin, but the Church could not err, and the right way to deal with obstinate heretics was not to talk to them, but to hunt them down and eliminate them. He came increasingly to distrust Contarini and Pole and their circle as feeble conciliators or worse, men with their libraries full of heretical writings, a crypto-Protestant fifth column within the Church.
Paul III was temperamentally more in sympathy with the outlook of the ‘Spirituals, as Contarini and his associates were known, but he supported both versions of reform. The collapse of negotiations between Contarini and representatives of the Protestant cause at Regensburg in 1541, however, gave Caraffa his head. The way of negotiation had failed, and Paul III asked Caraffa, ‘What remedy must be devised for this evil?’ Caraffa suggested the establishment of a Roman Inquisition, ‘to suppress and uproot error, permitting no trace to remain’. In July 1542 he was appointed one of six inquisitors general, with powers of arrest and scrutiny all over Europe, and a jurisdiction which overrode that of local bishops. Caraffa’s enthusiasm knew no bounds; he used his own resources to set up a headquarters and prison in Rome. In the same year Contarini died, deeply discouraged, and his type of conciliatory reform was further damaged when two of his protégés, the preachers Peter Martyr Vermigli and Bernardino Ochino, became panicky about the growth of repression, abandoned the Catholic Church, and fled to join Calvin in Geneva. Peter Martyr in due course would find his way to England and become Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford under Edward VI.
Paul III, however, knew that repression was not enough. He pressed on with reforms of the Curia and of the administrative and financial machinery of the papacy itself, abolishing most of the more scandalous sources of revenue, compensating by stepping up taxation in the Papal States: he is said to have trebled the tax revenue during his pontificate. He needed every penny, for he was helping subsidise Charles V’s wars against the German Protestant princes of the ‘Schmalkaldic League’. He was also pressing ahead with the reconstruction of Rome, to reflect both the spiritual and the temporal glory of the Church and papacy. Julius II had laid the foundation-stone of the new St Peter’s in 1506, but his death in 1513, and that of his architect Bramante in the following year, had left the project incomplete, and the greatest church in Christendom a building-site. It would remain so for more than a century, and though the work went forward under each succeeding pope, a series of chief architects (including Raphael) had deprived the scheme of the coherence and drive of Bramante’s original design.
In 1547 Paul appointed Michelangelo as chief architect for the new St Peter’s, and Michelangelo’s scheme was an inspired simplification and development of the original ‘Greek cross’ plan proposed by Bramante. It was to be surmounted by a stupendous dome, 370 feet high inside, one of the most daring and one of the most beautiful architectural structures ever raised. Michelangelo worked on St Peter’s for the rest of his life, refusing all fees since he considered it an offering to God and the Apostle. Seventy-two years old when he was appointed, he toiled on St Peter’s for seventeen years, but lived to see only the drum supporting the dome completed: the dome itself was not finished till 1590. Paul also commissioned him to create a splendid new civic centre on the Capitol, with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius as its centrepiece, and persuaded him to complete his great Last Judgement for the Sistine Chapel.
Alongside these papal ventures, other forces for change and renewal were making themselves felt in Rome. In the year of Paul’s election a young Florentine layman named Philip Neri came to Rome, where he began an unconventional ministry among the clerks and apprentices who crowded Rome’s inns and brothels, involving lay-preaching, individual spiritual direction, the traditional Roman pilgrimage to the seven basilicas and the catacombs, and the performance of sacred music. In the second half of the century popes and cardinals would compete to shower favours on Neri, who would be greeted as the ‘Apostle of Rome’. In 1540 there arrived a group of Spanish priests and laymen led by the ex-soldier Ignatius Loyola. Originally hoping to be missionaries to the Holy Land, they now placed themselves at the disposal of the Pope for missionary work wherever he chose to send them. In 1540 Paul issued a bull approving this ‘Society of Jesus’, and Ignatius became its first general. The Jesuits would become the single most important force within the Catholic Reformation, and one of the principal bulwarks of the papacy.
In December 1545 the long awaited Council met at Trent. It would continue, off and on, through the next five pontificates and it had many limitations. There were only thirty-one bishops at its opening, and only one of them was German. Even at its largest it never had more than 270 bishops present, and there were never more than thirteen Germans involved. To Protestant eyes it seemed a charade, populated by stooges on the Pope’s payroll. Proceedings were carefully regulated by papal legates in constant contact with Rome, and even some of the bishops doubted the genuine freedom of discussion. If the Holy Spirit was present at all, it was said, he must come in the Pope’s postbag.
Yet from its opening in 1545 the Catholic Church went on the offensive against the dangers which threatened it. Its mere existence was a triumph of papal diplomacy, and so was the fact that, despite Charles V’s efforts to prevent it, the Council from the start dealt with both doctrine and practical reform. It began by clasping the nettle, tackling doctrines like justification by faith which lay at the heart of the Protestant revolt. In a sense Trent came a generation too late, a generation during which the split in the Church had widened and hardened. Yet the intervening years had helped clarify issues, and the Council’s teaching on the contested points – justification, the seven sacraments, transubstantiation, purgatory – was uncompromising, but clear and cogent. It was not merely negative, however, and it eliminated a lot of dubious late-medieval Catholic interpretation as well as Protestant teaching. The Council’s doctrinal statements gave the Catholic Reformation a clear, firm agenda to work to.
Out of Trent, too,
came a whole raft of practical reforms. The Council adopted an entirely new system of training for clergy, in special colleges or ‘seminaries’ (the word means ‘seedbed’) designed to produce a better-educated, more moral and professionally conscious clergy. It made provision for more preaching and teaching, attacked abuses and superstition, insisted on more conscientious fulfilment of episcopal and priestly duties. The Church after Trent would be better organised, better staffed, more clerical, more vigilant, more repressive, altogether a more formidable institution. As its reforms took effect, the advance of Protestantism would be halted and then, slowly, reversed. None of this was instantaneous, and Paul III saw only its bare beginnings. But the process of reform was now unstoppable.
It survived the election of Giovanni del Monte as Julius III (1550–5), a man with all the worldliness of Paul but none of his greatness. Julius revolted everyone by his passion for onions, which he had delivered by the cartload. He outraged even the Romans by promoting his teenage monkey-keeper, Innocenzo, to the cardinalate, having first had him adopted by his brother. Innocenzo, who emphatically did not live up to his name, had been picked up by Julius in the street in Parma. The Pope visibly doted on him, and the charitably disposed told themselves the boy might after all be simply his bastard son. Julius reconvened the Council, but was incapable of leadership – one of the ambassadors at his court described him as a rabbit. Nevertheless, the transformation of Catholicism went on, for example in the founding of the Germanicum, a college staffed by Jesuits to train priests to recover Germany for the Catholic Church. Even under such a pope as Julius, the papacy had become the natural rallying point for the forces of Catholic recovery.
