Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  Elizabeth drove a middle course, establishing a form of Christianity that would one day be called Anglicanism, somewhere between a factionless Catholicism and the less fanatical forms of Protestantism. Henceforth, fanaticism would be frowned upon; and even untempered displays of enthusiasm would be discouraged. Individual conscience would be respected, so long as it in no way threatened the security of the state. The queen did not seek to make windows into men’s souls, as Francis Bacon would say of her. She could certainly be impatient with theological arguments. “There is only one Jesus Christ,” she declared, “and all the rest is a dispute over trifles.”

  She was hardly encouraged to sign herself in to either camp. In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated her and absolved her subjects from all obedience. This bald papal attempt to alter the government of England (and Ireland), though it caused an awful lot of trouble, casting a suspicion of treason over all of Elizabeth’s many Catholic subjects, did not succeed. Nor did the gratuitous insults of Calvin and his Scottish disciple John Knox warm her heart toward their form of Christianity. Calvin presumed to send her advice as if she were an inexperienced girl who could not possibly understand the great male world. Knox lost her attention even before her accession when, during her sister’s reign, he published The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, his attack on women rulers, a phenomenon Knox considered not only unfortunate but unnatural.

  Elizabeth could be wittily dismissive of theological earnestness. Asked her opinion about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, she replied:

  ’Twas God the Word that spake it,

  He took the Bread and brake it;

  And what the Word did make it

  That I believe, and take it.

  In moments like these she seems almost a figure in a play by Shakespeare. Indeed, she loved his plays, she loved art and music, both sacred and profane, she loved courtly dancing, and she made fun of Calvin’s simple little psalm tunes. Her preferences and her patronage helped to set England on a course to cultural greatness.

  Even more than for her promotion of the arts, however, it is for her political intelligence and her steely resolve that she is remembered. She appointed as her secretary of state William Cecil, just about the best royal appointment ever made in the history of the English monarchy, with these words: “This judgment I have of you that you will not be corrupted with any manner of gifts and that you will be faithful to the State.” When Mary’s widower, the king of Spain, decided that he should rule England, he sent off his supposedly unbeatable armada to conquer her realm. Elizabeth addressed her troops before the great battle with these words: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.”

  She knew who she was. As she put it, “I am your anointed queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.” Her motto was Semper eadem (“Always the same” or “Always herself”). Her vaunted virginity may, however, have had dark origins in unwanted attentions suffered as a teenager at the greedy hands of the second husband of Catherine Parr, who had been her father’s last wife and in whose household she lived after Catherine’s second marriage. (Nor could Mary’s example have encouraged Elizabeth to consider a dynastic marriage.)

  She asked that her epitaph be brief, recording only “my name, my virginity, the years of my reign, the reformation of religion under it, and my preservation of peace.” The last item was rightly the most important. But she was hardly perfect, as she herself knew and as any ancient Irishman would be happy to remind you.

  The unhappy consequences of the Tudors’ presumptuousness toward Ireland would endure for many poisonous centuries, even into our present.9 Nor should we fantasize that English life during Elizabeth’s reign was a sort of Shakespearean frolic. The visible wounds opened everywhere by the ravenous policies of Henry and his children would take centuries to heal. Evelyn Waugh in his biography of Edmund Campion, one of several Jesuit priests who operated illegally within Elizabeth’s realms and were brutally executed as traitors, describes the proximate consequences of the spoliation of the monasteries, which had served for centuries as refuges of peace and civilization. Though the justification of the Tudors for the plunder of wealthy monastic foundations throughout their realms was Reformation, the real motives were greed and the needs of a chronically cash-strapped monarchy. Waugh refers to scenes that could be seen everywhere that the Tutor crown held sway: “the buildings of the old monasteries, their roofs stripped of lead and their walls a quarry for the new contractors. The ruins were not yet picturesque; moss and ivy had barely begun their work, and age had not softened the stark lines of change. Many generations of orderly living, much gentle association, were needed before, under another Queen, the State Church should assume the venerable style of Barchester Towers.”

  The Virgin Queen lived almost to her seventieth birthday, a great age for her time. Her last days were sad and lonely, for all her friends, including Cecil, had preceded her in death. But though her physical weakness was becoming ever more apparent, she refused to take to her bed. When Cecil’s son visited her, he tried to coax her, saying, “Your Majesty, to content the people, you must go to bed.” Elizabeth, showing some of her old spirit, replied, “Little man, little man, must is not a word to be used to princes. If your late father were here he would never dare utter such a word.”

  Long after her pitiable demise, Anglicanism would become a global phenomenon (at least in those many lands where the English have at one time or another planted their flag), and its outward appearance would put it much closer to liturgically serious, bishop-led Catholicism than to any form of Protestantism; but it would be Catholicism without a pope and with a grave appreciation for bishops as representatives of their people—and, more recently, Catholicism with female priests and (at least in some provinces) even female bishops, Catholicism with (at least in some provinces) welcome, even ordination, for gays and lesbians, even marital blessing on single-sex couples.10 It would not be entirely unwarranted to speculate that a noncelibate priesthood may have eventually enabled Anglicanism to address sexual issues with more realism and wisdom than the formally celibate Catholic hierarchy has been able to achieve.

  1562–1648: LET’S KILL ’EM ALL!

  In John’s Gospel, Jesus articulates the norm by which his true disciples may be identified: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” Christians seem to have followed this norm even as late as the early third century, if we are to credit the testimony of the early African theologian Tertullian, who describes the surprise of the pagans of the Roman empire in their encounters with contemporary Christians: “ ‘Look,’ they say, ‘how they love one another’ (for they themselves hate one another); ‘and how they are ready to die for each other’ (for they themselves are readier to kill each other).”

  Alas, the norm of inter-Christian love would finally give way to internecine warfare. At first, there would be strident arguments over theological formulations. One of these conflicts would whack Tertullian himself, leaving him labeled a heretic, principally on account of his minority position on formulating an adequate technical description of the Trinity. But soon enough, blood would flow in the streets of Constantinople, as warring factions of monks, each devoted to a different theological formulation, tried to cut one another down. I suppose if you had decided your opponent was a counterfeit Christian, you would think yourself relieved of any responsibility to treat him kindly.

  Verbal and physical sparring, tracking down heretics, putting whole communities to the sword, the very public (and insanely cruel) burning of supposed heretics—all these activities grew slowly, intermittently, and regionally over the course of
the medieval centuries, Europe’s avowedly Christian centuries. But in the sixteenth century, the inter-Christian violence grew exponentially. Open-air burnings became more common and more elaborate liturgically: comfortable, curtained boxes would be provided for local lords and higher clergy; colorfully vested bishops and priests (or severely vested reformed ministers), often assisted by acolytes or other lesser ecclesial servants, would process about as if engaged in a service in a church sanctuary; a preacher would mount a specially constructed pulpit to sermonize the condemned and terrify the spectators, for whom temporary stadium seats had been constructed; the condemned prisoners would be paraded in their dunce’s hats; the ghoulish conclusion, anticipated by all, would be public torture by fire, ending in horrifying death. Why burning, rather than, say, hanging or decapitation? Because the great Christian promise, the hope of all believers, was physical resurrection at the end of time—and you couldn’t be resurrected if you had no body, could you? The promise of the waking of the dead and their rising from their graves must not be permitted to heretics.

  And now, as whole regions, whole kingdoms even, were in the course of adopting “heretical” beliefs (or recommitting themselves to their traditional “heretical” beliefs)—and as princes and other political lords and leaders saw that land grabs and even more subtle, more fully compassing modes of political domination could be ascribed to pious religious motives—the occasional conflict of Christian against Christian progressed swiftly to bloody regional clashes and thence to unforgiving national wars, a state of affairs that Europe would hardly attempt to forsake till the bleak period of unavoidable reflection that would follow the global disaster of World War II. Let’s draw our swords and kill all the Others—all the heretics, all their spouses, all their children, for all these are hopelessly compromised by their invincible wrongheadedness and their perverted commitments.

  No epitome of the conflicts that wracked Europe from the 1560s to the middle of the seventeenth century could possibly account for the needless suffering that men inflicted on their fellow men and on the women and children trapped in these hostilities. So I shall not try. We pause briefly only to bow our heads in the direction of a few glaringly unavoidable highlights.

  In our appreciation of Rabelais, we had occasion to note that, though he had a naysayer’s spirit, he had little or no access to the company of men like Luther. By the time of Rabelais’s death in 1553, such contact was becoming more feasible for a Frenchman. In fact, less than a decade after Rabelais died, the first of the French Wars of Religion commenced. By the usual count there would be seven more of these throughout the century, though it is also possible to view them as one nearly continuous war.

  The wars (or war) were partly made possible by a continuing weakness in the French monarchy of this period: a series of kings were underage or ill or ineffective. This continuing intergenerational weakness permitted powerful lesser lords to grow ever more powerful, asserting their rights against one another as the royal family, the House of Valois, stood helplessly by. Though there were many lords involved in many clashes, the two leading families were the Bourbons and the Guise, neither of which intended to cede anything to the other. The Valois were religiously and temperamentally moderate, Catholic by tradition but humanistic and intellectually open. Their leader and the source of their continuity was the widowed queen mother, the durable Italian Catherine de’ Medici, who, sometimes serving as regent, did her best to protect the king of the moment but who also got a great chortle out of reading aloud from the most outrageous Protestant propaganda, which assaulted her mercilessly. The France from which Calvin had had to exile himself was becoming an increasingly fruitful field for Protestantism of the Calvinist variety, thanks especially to operational planning initiated by the well-organized Calvin himself.

  The Bourbons saw themselves as championing their fellow Huguenots, which is how French Calvinists were then designated (though no one today is entirely certain of the origin of the designation). Huguenots were suddenly everywhere, accounting for more than half of all the nobility, who worshipped in more than a thousand Huguenot churches in the company of two million of their fellow Calvinists.

  The Guise were exceedingly aggressive and self-righteous super-Catholics. Though Catherine had reason to distrust both factions, the Guise gave her nightmares. In early 1562, Guise retainers, opposed to concessions the crown had made to Huguenots, surrounded a worship service in Champagne and massacred all the people at prayer, who, in conformity with the king’s edict of limited toleration, had assembled outside the walls of their town.11 In the course of the melee, the Duke of Guise was accidentally cut on his cheek. His followers, seeing this, became enraged and set off through the town, Wassy-sur-Blaise, killing every human being they could find.

  This was not the first French massacre of Protestants, nor would it be the last. Nor would violence be perpetrated only by Catholic partisans, though the Protestant violence tended to be less frequent and less extreme. Fear of intervention by outside powers—Spain and the papacy on the Catholic side, the English and the Dutch on the Protestant side—was not without foundation and added to the increasing paranoia of all parties. The most infamous massacre of all, beginning in Paris on August 24, 1572, Saint Bartholomew’s Day, and continuing for days afterward, resulted in the murders and mutilation of untold thousands of Huguenots in the capital and in a dozen provincial cities.

  The precipitating incident was the murder of the Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny by the Duke of Guise and his men. Coligny was an ally of the young king, and the Guise party afterward claimed that they feared Coligny was about to stage a coup. The outrages to which they subjected the admiral’s dead body—castration and other mutilations, suspension from a public gallows, burning—suggest that Guise’s fears were ineradicably mixed with the vengeful hatred of the classical tyrant. Certainly, his example stoked up the fears and rage of the Catholic partisans, who repeated their horrifying butchery throughout France, having been given leave to enact the worst nightmares that human beings are capable of. Both Philip II of Spain and Pope Gregory XIII, relying on the intelligence that a Protestant coup had been frustrated, ordered bells to be tolled, Te Deums to be sung, festivals to be celebrated.

  Though Gregory was hardly the worst of popes, his blessing of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, along with his strong encouragement of Philip II’s invasion of England (and, following the failure of the Spanish Armada, the papal plots to assassinate Elizabeth), gave him the reputation of a depraved monster in Protestant Europe. It is not surprising that the Protestant countries refused to accept his (very necessary) reform of the Julian calendar, thus initiating a long period of confusion in which different countries kept different calendars.

  The French war(s) did not end with the infamous massacre but continued through five additional and consistently bloody phases, ending only after the “War of the Three Henrys.” Catherine de’ Medici’s sole surviving son, Henry III, was king. With no issue at hand, Henry knew that, in accordance with the Salic law of France, the crown should pass to his Bourbon cousin Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot. Knowing also that Paris, in particular, would never accept a Protestant king, King Henry tried to convince his cousin to convert to Catholicism but was unsuccessful in his attempts. A third Henry, Duke of Guise, militant leader of the militant Catholic League, was certain to stand against Henry of Navarre’s accession, no matter his formal adherence. So the king had Henry of Guise killed, after which he himself was fatally knifed by a sneaky Dominican.

  The war that followed was a seesawing conflict between Henry of Navarre’s forces and those of the Catholic League. Huguenot Henry, a keen and courageous cock of the walk, gradually realized that his royal cousin had been right: he would never gain Paris unless he was Catholic. So, with the warm encouragement of his favorite mistress, he shrugged and became a Catholic, saying (or so legend would have us believe), “Paris vaut bien une messe” (“Paris is worth a mass”). As Henry IV he would re
ign vigorously and skillfully for more than two decades, establishing freedom of religion under the Edict of Nantes and bestowing peace and its benefits on his previously divided country. But in 1610 he was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic (and failed Jesuit) named Ravaillac. The Catholic League had tried repeatedly to end Henry’s life. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has written, “With one major assassination attempt a year, the murderous persistence of their religious zeal would have won admiration in the 1990s from devotees of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie.”

  The peace that fell on France, thanks to a king who was Huguenot, Catholic, and very smart, would now fail by degrees, as France would be pulled back and forth by conflicts beyond its borders. Europeans had long specialized in interminable wars. The late Middle Ages had witnessed the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Even now, as Henry of Navarre’s son, Louis XIII, ascended the French throne, the Spanish and the Dutch were in the midst of their Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) over the religious destiny of the Netherlands. And less than a decade after the assassination of Henry, the Thirty Years’ War would start up, involving most of Europe in bloody disputes over religion and territory—or, rather, starting with religion and ending in territory, ending indeed in 1648 with no one among the exhausted combatants able to articulate persuasively why they had been fighting each other for thirty years. In battles too numerous to name, Catholic forces had gradually won back some territories—such as Bohemia, the lower Netherlands (now Belgium), parts of Germany, even parts of France—that had been previously ceded to Protestants. With few exceptions, the results established the map of Europe as it stands today. But no one will ever be able to begin to account for the blood that was shed.