Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  Years earlier, Luther, when dealing with the Zwickau Prophets, had feared that the subject of infant baptism would create turmoil, and this was now coming to pass. The Anabaptists first appeared in and around Zurich in 1525. Drawn to Zwingli’s brand of sweeping reform but frustrated by his go-slow approach, they began holding private services at which they baptized one another. From Zurich the movement quickly spread to communities around Lake Zurich and Lake Constance. On hillsides, in fields, and on riverbanks, humble Christians gathered for simple services and readings from the New Testament, followed by an anointing with water. In their effort to create a sanctified society, the Anabaptists stopped attending sermons lest they be corrupted by them; to show their separation from the world, they refused to greet outsiders. In Zurich, they grew increasingly vehement and disruptive, parading about town with ropes around their waists and willow rods in hand, crying, “Woe to Zurich” and calling Zwingli the Antichrist.

  In their refusal to take oaths and to serve in the military, the Swiss Brethren (as these early Anabaptists were called) posed a direct challenge to the authority of both the town council and Zwingli himself—a situation neither could tolerate. In an attempt to address it, a disputation was held in Zurich from November 6 to 8, 1525; it attracted such a crowd that it was moved from the town hall to Zurich’s largest church. The meeting quickly descended into name-calling, however, and several of the movement’s early leaders were arrested and jailed. On March 7, 1526, in a mandate that would become notorious, the Zurich council declared that anyone caught rebaptizing another could be subject to the death penalty.

  On December 3, 1526, one Anabaptist leader, Felix Mantz, was seized in Zurich for violating the mandate. Refusing to recant, he was sentenced to death. On January 5, 1527, he was walked from the fish market to the Limmat River. Waiting along the way were his mother and brother, who encouraged him to remain true to his beliefs. He did so, praising God as he went. Mantz was trussed, with a stick thrust between his bound-together legs and arms, and lowered by rope from a boat into the icy water. “Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,” he sang. He thus became the first evangelical executed by other evangelicals.

  Though traumatized by Mantz’s execution, the Anabaptists were determined to carry on. Scattering from Zurich, they traveled up the Rhine to Strasbourg and the Low Countries; north to Augsburg, Thuringia, and beyond; and east into the Tirol and Moravia. Seeking hope in hard times, peasants and craftsmen came out to be baptized anew and commit themselves to a life of repentance and renewal. Most of those converting were pious, peace-loving men and women seeking to imitate the lives of the early Christians, but their insistent detachment and aggressive proselytizing inflamed the authorities. At all times, the Anabaptists faced the threat of execution, but their stoic acceptance of it, along with the irreproachability of their lives, won them many followers.

  The campaign against them intensified after the 1529 Diet of Speyer. There, the death penalty was mandated for all adult baptizers. In the following years, both Ferdinand and his brother Charles V would seek zealously to enforce it, and with so many Anabaptists going willingly to the stake, it was decreed that their tongues should be cut out to keep them from confessing their faith. Protestant leaders were no less ruthless. In January 1530, six relapsed Anabaptists were executed at Reinhardsbrunn in Saxony. When Elector John requested an opinion from the Wittenberg theologians, Melanchthon prepared an enthusiastic endorsement of the death penalty for Anabaptists. Luther, who saw them as the offspring of Karlstadt and Müntzer, concurred. Earlier, he had opposed the use of capital punishment in the case of such “false prophets,” considering banishment more appropriate, but the Anabaptists were causing him to reconsider. “Although it seems cruel to punish them with the sword,” he wrote, “it is crueler that they condemn the ministry of the Word and have no well-grounded doctrine and suppress the true and in this way seek to subvert the civil order.” Between 1527 and 1533, an estimated eight hundred Anabaptists would be executed in Europe.

  When the Anabaptists themselves gained power, however, they could be just as brutal as their persecutors, as the infamous case of Münster in northwestern Germany showed. In 1534, a group of apocalyptically minded Anabaptists gained control of that town and, seeking to transform it into a New Jerusalem, they imposed a reign of revolutionary terror. Catholic and Lutheran unbelievers were driven out, all books but the Bible were burned, the practice of polygamy was introduced, and grisly executions were held. After sixteen months of such grotesque carnival, the town was starved into submission by the prince-bishop of Münster. Three of the Anabaptist ringleaders were taken to the marketplace. For a full hour, their skin was torn away by red-hot pincers. Their tongues were then pulled out, and a burning dagger was plunged into their hearts. Their bodies were placed in cages, hung from the steeple of St. Lambert’s church, and there left to rot.

  After the Münster debacle, practicing Anabaptism became even more dangerous. Most of the remaining adherents preached nonviolence and brotherhood, but their opponents did not. Menno Simons, a Dutch reformer who accepted the faith in 1536, offered a grim catalog of their persecution:

  Some they have hanged, some they have tortured with inhuman tyranny and afterward choked with cords on the stake. Some they have roasted and burned alive. Some they have killed with the sword and given to the fowls of the air to devour. Some they have cast to the fishes; some have had their houses destroyed; some have been cast into slimy bogs. Some had their feet cut off, one of whom I have seen and conversed with. Others wander about here and there, in want, homelessness and affliction, in mountains and deserts, in holes and caves of the earth, as Paul says. They must flee with their wives and little children from one country to another, from one city to another. They are hated, abused, slandered, and belied by all men. By the theologians and magistrates they are denounced. They are deprived of their food, are driven forth in the cold of winter and pointed at with the finger of scorn.

  Menno Simons himself was hunted throughout his life. He managed to survive by staying constantly on the move, eventually ending up in Lübeck on the shores of the Baltic. The Mennonites are named after him. They, along with another group of Anabaptist offspring, the Amish, would ultimately find refuge in America. Today, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Holmes County, Ohio, one can see modern-day versions of the type of biblical community that Karlstadt had sought to set up in Orlamünde.

  Zwingli, who so violently sought to suppress the Anabaptists, would himself fall prey to religious violence. With his mix of evangelical fervor and Erasmian concern for moral improvement, he became increasingly autocratic, and in the late 1520s he began a push to turn Zurich into Europe’s first truly puritanical city. Church attendance was made compulsory. Organ playing was forbidden as a distraction from the solemn devotion demanded by God. A marriage court was set up, and it quickly became a morals tribunal that monitored residents through a network of informers. Courting couples were spied on, and husbands returning home late were reported to the court. According to one city council member, “There is fear and suspicion everywhere, among families and officials alike, everyone is afraid to go near the pulpit.”

  Not content with purifying Zurich, Zwingli wanted to evangelize all of Switzerland, with himself as its supreme leader. In 1529, he created a Christian Civic Union, in which Zurich was joined by Bern, Basel, the German city of Constance, and other territories that had adopted the Reformation. Through this league, Zwingli immediately began working to subdue and suppress Switzerland’s “forest” cantons, which remained Catholic. Feeling threatened and encircled, these cantons formed their own Christian Alliance. Mobilizing, Zwingli raised a large army while issuing broadsides against the Catholics. The Catholics countered by forming an army of their own. Zwingli doggedly sought to provoke them, and in the first week of June 1529 the two forces clashed near the town of Kappel, twelve miles south of Zurich. After sixteen days during which few shots were fired, a peace was concluded i
n which each side agreed to let the other worship as it saw fit.

  It would not hold. To Zwingli, the peace constituted a betrayal of the Gospel, and he imposed an economic and food blockade on the Catholics. On October 9, 1531, the Catholic cantons, in a surprise move, declared war on Zurich. Because of internal divisions, Zurich was slow to mobilize, but on October 11 a disorganized force of 3,500 Zurichers set off once more toward Kappel. They included many pastors, Zwingli among them. The Catholic army was twice as large, and when the two forces met, on the mountain slope above the former Cistercian abbey at Kappel, the Zurichers were quickly routed. Zwingli, discovered wounded on the battlefield, was run through with a sword. His body was quartered and burned and his ashes were mixed with dung and thrown to the wind—a gruesome end for the onetime pacifistic Erasmian.

  When word of Zwingli’s fate reached Basel, Johannes Oecolampadius—already gravely ill—became heartbroken, and six weeks later he, too, was dead. Erasmus could not hide his relief at the passing of these two former disciples turned evangelists. With their deaths, the first generation of leaders of the Swiss Reformation was gone. It would take another decade for a new one to appear, led by an even more resolute reformer who would complete in Geneva what Zwingli had begun in Zurich.

  For Erasmus—as for much of Europe—it was the dramatic turn of events in England that was most shocking. In September 1529, he had sent a servant to England with letters to various friends and patrons as well as copies of the recently published edition of Augustine. When the servant returned (sometime before the end of the year), he delivered two sensational bits of news: Henry—desperate for a papal dispensation to invalidate his marriage to Catherine—had dismissed Thomas Wolsey as his lord chancellor. And as Wolsey’s replacement, he had named Thomas More. Erasmus, together with humanists across Europe, marveled at the elevation of one of their own to England’s highest appointed post. More himself, however, was less sanguine, for he was a supporter of Catherine and wary of getting drawn into the king’s “great matter,” as the divorce was called. As chancellor, though, he would be able to draw on the full powers of the state to pursue his main preoccupation: fighting heresy.

  Just a few months before his appointment, More had issued his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, a long and furious tirade against “the pestilent sect of Luther and Tyndale.” By that point, as many as twenty thousand copies of Tyndale’s New Testament were in circulation, many of them in England. With weavers and shepherds now able to read the Gospels in their own tongue, More worried about the seditious ideas they might develop. In his Dialogue, he offered a fierce defense not only of Rome and the pope but also of pilgrimages, relics, saints, and other forms of traditional piety. On miracles alone he spent fourteen chapters, fiercely seeking to defend their validity. Because the Church can never err, More insisted, all Christians must obey it. Heretics were evil men whose notions, if adopted, would lead to the end of religious belief and the destruction of civilization. Tyndale’s translation was not a true rendering of the Christian Scriptures but rather a clever fabrication created in the interests of heresy, and More expressed dismay that any good Christian could oppose its being burned. Yet it was not just books that in his view deserved the flames; More devoted an entire chapter to explaining why the burning of heretics “is lawful, necessary, and well done.”

  As chancellor, More would now be in a position to act on such convictions. On December 24, 1529, he issued a decree in the king’s name that called on the civil authorities to assist the Church with their “whole power and diligence” to root out heresy. The measure prohibited the sale, import, and possession of heretical books and demanded that every officeholder in the land seek out such texts. It offered a list of 118 banned titles, with Tyndale’s New Testament at the top. A follow-up decree banned all vernacular translations of the Bible, citing “the malignity of this present time, with the inclination of people to erroneous opinions.”

  It had been many years since the last burning of a heretic in England, but that would soon change. Thomas Hitton was a Catholic priest who, embracing both Luther and Zwingli, had become an evangelical “runner,” carrying messages and books between England and the Low Countries. On a brief visit to England in 1529 to contact supporters, he was seized near the mouth of the Thames and found to possess letters from English exiles. Arrested on the grounds of heresy, he was interrogated, probably tortured, and condemned to death. In early 1530, Hitton was burned at the stake—the first English Protestant to be executed. More was not directly involved in the case, but he would later express satisfaction at its outcome, calling Hitton “the devil’s stinking martyr.”

  In 1530, More gained an important new ally. Cuthbert Tunstall, the longtime bishop of London, was replaced by John Stokesley. A former chaplain and almoner to Henry, Stokesley would become known as the hammer of heretics for his unrelenting efforts to suppress them. Together, he and More would introduce a sort of English inquisition, with church and state joining forces to combat religious radicalism in a bid to avert the type of catastrophe that had befallen Germany.

  In his writings, More candidly described how he went about intercepting letters and interrogating suspects. Some of the examinations took place in the Star Chamber, the secret court that met at Westminster Palace. Others were carried out at More’s Chelsea home; suspects were placed in stocks while he probed, harassed, and threatened them, seeking information about Tyndale and his accomplices. Royal agents were sent to the Continent to try to find Tyndale. Somehow he managed to elude them. Though his whereabouts in this period are not clear, Tyndale was probably in Antwerp, moving from house to house, living hand to mouth. When he saw a copy of More’s Dialogue, he prepared the equally venomous Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, accusing More of having started out on the road to reform, only to turn back after being bribed by the clergy. (This was but one of many polemical works turned out by Tyndale, whose lexicon of invective was no less extensive than More’s.)

  Throughout, Tyndale continued to translate, moving on from the New Testament to the Old. When he left England, he knew little or no Hebrew. (England had expelled its Jews in 1290, so there were no instructors.) On the Continent, Tyndale was able to gain a working knowledge of the language, and with it he made his way through the Five Books of Moses. Given Antwerp’s proximity to England, Tyndale felt that printing the translation there would be too dangerous, so he sailed for Hamburg. Off the coast of Holland, however, his ship was driven off course in a storm and smashed to pieces on some rocks. With other passengers and crew members he managed to make it ashore, but he lost his entire manuscript along with his reference books. Some weeks later, he reached Hamburg by another ship. Tyndale worked around the clock to reconstruct his translation. By the end of the year he had a full text. He quickly found a printer, and by the early summer of 1530 copies of his Moses were entering England.

  It would prove no less pathbreaking than his Gospels. For יהוה (YHWH), the unpronounceable tetragrammaton of God’s name, Tyndale came up with “Jehovah”; for פסח (“Pesach”), he gave “Passover.” Where the Wyclif Bible at Genesis 1:3 had “light be made,” he gave “let there be light.” He also introduced “flowing with milk and honey,” “the fat of the land,” “the apple of his eye,” and “a stranger in a strange land.” Replicating the classic Hebrew pattern of noun plus noun, he created phrases like “gate of heaven” (instead of “heaven’s gate”) and “children of Israel” (rather than “Israel’s children”). There was something in this pattern that pleased the English ear, and it would become a fixture of the English language. Where the Hebrew seemed ungainly, Tyndale found ways to lighten it. Moses’s appeal to the pharaoh at Exodus 5:1, for instance, translated literally as “Send free my people”; Tyndale instead came up with “Let my people go.”

  Unwilling to let his translation speak for itself, however, he included marginal glosses, many of them highly tendentious. For instance, at Exodus 32:28, which describes the slaughter of three thou
sand Israelites for worshipping the golden calf, Tyndale observed, “The pope’s bull slayeth more than Aaron’s calf.” To Catholics, Tyndale’s Moses, like his Gospels, seemed a cleverly camouflaged device for spreading Lutheran views, and so the dragnet against him and his allies was tightened. When a book smuggler named George Constantine was arrested, More had him placed in the stocks at his home. After days of interrogation, Constantine revealed the names of collaborators and described smuggling methods, including the identity of a shipment and the secret marks placed on packets to indicate contraband books. Acting on this information, More was able to seize and burn many volumes as well as round up more suspects, several of whom were condemned to the stake. Of one victim, More would later gloat that he had relapsed into heresy “like a dog returning to his vomit.” In all, at least four and perhaps six people went to the stake for their religious views during More’s chancellorship. The degree of his personal responsibility is unclear; the wholeheartedness of his approval is not. Between twenty and forty others were condemned to prison, many for long periods.

  Paradoxically, while More was hunting down these opponents of Rome, Henry was turning toward them. At one point, Anne Boleyn gave him a copy of a recently published tract by Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man Drawing heavily on Luther, Tyndale argued that kings rule by divine right and that whoever resists the sovereign—even if he is a tyrant—“resists God.” The book also attacked the pope for not seeing that Scripture is the fountainhead of Christianity, and it maintained that the king should have authority over ecclesiastical affairs. “This is the book for me and all kings to read,” Henry is reported to have said on sampling it.

  Infuriated by Rome’s intransigence, Henry began an aggressive campaign against ecclesiastical authority in England, criticizing clerical pomp and privilege with an asperity that sounded almost Lutheran. Beginning on November 3, 1529, and continuing for more than six years, Parliament met in a series of sessions that would mount a broad assault on the Church’s wealth and power. This “Reformation Parliament,” as it came to be known, moved cautiously at first. It checked the clergy’s control over probate wills and curtailed its right to collect taxes. It prohibited the holding of plural benefices and stipulated that clerics charged with felonies should thenceforth be tried in civil courts. The revenues from annates and other fees for ecclesiastical offices were to remain in England rather than go to Rome. In 1531, Henry was acknowledged as the protector and supreme head of the Church in England “as far as the law of Christ allows.” The king floated the idea of producing a Bible in English so as to give Christians clear springs from which to drink.