Divided Realms

European rulers viewed religious division as a dangerous challenge to the unity and stability of their rule. Subjects who considered their rulers heretics or blasphemers could only cause trouble, and religious differences encouraged the formation of competing noble factions, which easily led to violence when weak monarchs or children ruled.

In France, King Francis I tolerated Protestants until the Affair of the Placards in 1534. Even then, the government could not stop many French noble families—including some of the most powerful—from converting to Calvinism, especially in southern and western France. Francis and his successor, Henry II (r. 1547–1559), succeeded in maintaining a balance of power between Catholics and Calvinists, but after Henry’s death the weakened monarchy could no longer hold together the fragile realm. The real drama of the Reformation in France took place after 1560, when the country plunged into four decades of religious wars, whose savagery was unparalleled elsewhere in Europe (see Chapter 15).

In England and Scotland religious divisions at the very top threatened the control of the rulers. Before his death in 1547, Henry VIII had succeeded in making himself head of the Church of England, but the nature of that church remained ambiguous. The advisers of the boy king Edward VI (r. 1547–1553) furthered the Protestant cause by welcoming prominent religious refugees who had been deeply influenced by Calvinism and wanted to see England move in that austere direction. But Edward died at age fifteen, opening the way to his Catholic half sister, Mary Tudor, who had been restored to the line of succession by an act of Parliament under Henry VIII in 1544.

When Mary (r. 1553–1558) came to the throne, she restored Catholicism and persecuted Protestants. Nearly three hundred Protestants perished at the stake, and more than eight hundred fled to the Protestant German states and Switzerland. Finally, when Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, succeeded her half sister Mary, becoming Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), the English Protestant cause gained lasting momentum. Under Elizabeth’s leadership, Protestantism came to define the character of the English nation, though the influence of Calvinism within it was still a cause for dispute. Catholics were tolerated only if they kept their opinions on religion and politics to themselves. A tentative but nonetheless real peace returned to England.

Still another pattern of religious politics unfolded in Scotland, where Protestants formed a small minority until the 1550s. At the center of Scotland’s conflict over religion stood Mary of Guise, a French native and Catholic married to the king of Scotland, James V. After James died in 1542, Mary surrounded herself and her daughter Mary Stuart, also a Catholic and heir to the throne, with French advisers. When, in 1558, Mary Stuart married Francis, the son of Henry II and the heir to the French throne, many Scottish noblemen, alienated by this pro-French atmosphere, joined the pro-English, anti-French Protestant cause. They gained control of the Scottish Parliament in 1560 and dethroned the regent, Mary of Guise. Eventually they forced her daughter—by then known as Mary, queen of Scots—to flee to England, and installed Mary’s infant son, James, as king. Scotland would turn toward the Calvinist version of the Reformation and thus establish the potential for conflict with England.

In the German states, the Protestant princes and cities formed the Schmalkaldic League in 1531. Opposing the league were Emperor Charles V, the bishops, and the few remaining Catholic princes. Although Charles had to concentrate on fighting the French and the Turks during the 1530s, he eventually secured the western Mediterranean and then turned his attention back home to central Europe to try to resolve the growing religious differences in his lands.

After efforts to mediate between Protestants and Catholics broke down, Charles prepared to fight the Protestant Schmalkaldic League. War broke out in 1547, the year after Martin Luther’s death. Using seasoned Spanish veterans and German allies, Charles occupied the German imperial cities in the south, restoring Catholic elites and suppressing the Reformation. When Protestant commanders could not agree on a joint strategy, Charles crushed the Schmalkaldic League’s armies at Mühlberg in Saxony and captured the leading Lutheran princes. Jubilant, Charles restored Catholics’ right to worship in Protestant lands while permitting Lutherans to keep their own rites. Protestant resistance to the declaration was deep and widespread: many pastors went into exile, and riots broke out in many cities. Charles’s success did not last long. The Protestant princes regrouped, declared war in 1552, and chased a surprised, unprepared, and practically bankrupt emperor back to Italy.

Forced to compromise, Charles V agreed to the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The settlement recognized the Lutheran church in the empire; accepted the secularization of church lands but “reserved” the remaining ecclesiastical territories for Catholics; and, most important, established the principle that all princes, whether Catholic or Lutheran, enjoyed the sole right to determine the religion of their lands and subjects. Calvinist, Anabaptist, and other dissenting groups were excluded from the settlement. Ironically, the religious revolt of the common people had culminated in a princes’ reformation. The Augsburg settlement preserved a fragile peace in central Europe until 1618, but the exclusion of Calvinists would prompt future conflict.

Exhausted by decades of war and dismayed by the disunity in Christian Europe, Emperor Charles V resigned his many thrones in 1555 and 1556, leaving his Netherlandish-Burgundian and Spanish dominions to his son, Philip II, and his Austrian lands to his brother, Ferdinand (who was also elected Holy Roman Emperor to succeed Charles). Retiring to a monastery in southern Spain, the most powerful of the Christian monarchs spent his last years quietly seeking salvation.