Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (23 page)

Within hours of this address (which was given at nine o’clock in the morning), the Lutheran deacon of the nearby church of St Peter’s was delivering a furious counter-volley from the pulpit, in which he charged that ‘the Calvinists call our place of worship a whorehouse [… ]; they strip our churches of pictures and now wish to tear the Lord Jesus Christ from us as well.’ So stirring was the effect of his oratory that an assembly of more than one hundred Berlin burghers met on the same evening to pledge that they would ‘strangle the Reformed priests and all other Calvinists’. On the following day, a Monday, a full-scale riot broke out in the city, in the course of which shots were fired and a crowd of over 700 people raged through the town centre, sacking the houses of two prominent Calvinist preachers, including Füssel, who was forced to escape by climbing over a neighbour’s roof in his underwear.
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At one point, the Elector’s brother was caught up in a confrontation with the crowd and only narrowly escaped serious injury. A chain of similar (if generally less spectacular) conflicts broke out in other towns across the Mark. So serious was the sense of emergency that a number of the Calvinist councillors in Berlin considered leaving the territory. At the
end of the year, as he made to retire to his estates in the county of Jägerndorf (in Silesia), Margrave John George lugubriously advised his brother the Elector to expand his bodyguard.

In addition to this pressure from the street, John Sigismund faced concerted resistance from the Estates. Dominated by the Lutheran provincial nobilities, the Estates exploited their control over taxation to extract concessions from the deeply indebted Elector. In January 1615, they informed him that the approval of further funds would be dependent upon his granting certain religious guarantees. The status of the Lutheran church establishment must be confirmed; the church patronage rights that placed the power of clerical appointment in the hands of local elites must be respected, and the Elector must promise not to use his own patronage rights to appoint teachers or clergymen who appeared suspect in the eyes of the Lutheran populace. John Sigismund responded with outraged blustering – he would rather shed the last drop of his blood, he declared, than yield to such blackmail. But he backed down. In an edict of 5 February 1615 he conceded that subjects who were attached to the doctrine of Luther and the key texts of the Lutheran tradition were entitled to remain so and must not be in any way pressed or compelled to relinquish them. ‘For His Electoral Highness,’ the edict continued, ‘in no way arrogates to himself dominion over consciences and therefore does not wish to impose any suspect or unwelcome preachers on anyone, even in places where he enjoys the right of patronage…’
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This was a serious setback. At this point, at the very latest, it must have dawned on the Elector that the ‘second Reformation’ might have to be postponed or even deferred indefinitely.

What exactly was at stake in these struggles? Clearly there was a power-political dimension. Even before 1613, the Electors’ use of ‘foreign’ Calvinist officials had been controversial, not just on religious grounds but also because it contravened the ‘
ius indigenatus
’ by which appointments to senior offices were reserved to the native-born elites. There was also, as we have seen, a widespread reluctance to accept the costs incurred by a Calvinist foreign policy. Townsfolk clearly resented Calvinist officials and clergy as intruders into an urban space whose key cultic monuments were also focal points of urban identity. But it would be wrong to reduce the Calvinist-Lutheran quarrels to a ‘politics of interest’, in which denunciations and complaints are seen as encoded
bids for advantage.
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For on both sides in the confrontation, powerful emotions were engaged. At the heart of the most committed forms of Calvinism was a fastidious shudder of disgust at the strands of papalism that survived within Lutheran observance.

This was in part an aesthetic issue: to the colourful extravagance of a Lutheran church interior, with its candles and images graven and painted glowing with reflected fire, the Calvinists opposed the white space of a purified church, suffused with natural light. There was also an authentic apprehension that Catholicism remained a latent force
within
Lutheranism. A particular focus of concern was the Lutheran communion rite; Elector John Sigismund objected to Luther’s doctrine of the real presence in the Lord’s Supper, calling it a ‘false, divisive and highly controversial teaching’. In the words of the Calvinist theologian Simon Pistoris, author of a controversial tract published in Berlin in 1613, Luther ‘derived his views from the darkness of papacy, and thus inherited the errors and false opinions of transubstantiation, whereby the bread is changed into the body of Christ’. As a consequence, the Lutheran faith had become ‘a pillar and a prop to the papacy’.
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In other words, the Reformation remained incomplete. If a complete break with the darkness of the Catholic past were not accomplished, then the danger of re-Catholicization loomed. The Calvinists felt implicitly that the forward progress of time itself was at stake: if the confessional accomplishments of the recent past were not consolidated and expanded, they would be reversed and expunged from history.

The Lutherans, for their part, were motivated by a powerful attachment to their festal ceremonies and the paraphernalia, visual and liturgical, of their worship. There was a rich historical irony here. It was the achievement of the sixteenth-century Hohenzollern Electors of Brandenburg to have slowed and moderated the spread of reform within Brandenburg, with the result that the territory’s Lutheran Reformation was one of the most conservative in the Empire. Brandenburg Lutheranism was marked by doctrinal orthodoxy and a powerful attachment to traditional ceremony, tendencies that were reinforced by the Electoral administration throughout the last decades of the sixteenth century. A widespread fear of Calvinism and sporadic bursts of anti-Calvinist polemic towards the end of the century helped to focus Lutheran allegiances on the foundational documents of the territorial church, such as the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and the Formula of Concord of 1577,
which defined its doctrinal substance. It could thus be argued that the dynasty itself had helped to create a brand of Lutheranism uniquely resistant to the Calvinist appeal.

The strength of this resistance forced the Elector and his Calvinist advisers to abandon their hopes of a Second Brandenburg Reformation. They settled instead for a ‘court reformation’ (
Hofreformation
), whose religious energies petered out on the fringes of the political elite.
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Yet even within the confines of court society Calvinism did not enjoy unchallenged hegemony. John Sigismund’s wife, the redoubtable Anna of Prussia, upon whose blood lines depended the claims to Ducal Prussia and the Jülich succession, remained a staunch Lutheran and continued to oppose the new order. The fact that Lutheran services were held for her in the palace chapel provided an encouragement and a focal point for popular resistance. She also maintained close contacts with neighbouring Saxony, the chief engine-house of Lutheran orthodoxy and the source of unending Lutheran polemics against the godless Calvinists in Berlin. In 1619, when John Sigismund died, she invited a prominent Saxon Lutheran controversialist, Balthasar Meisner, to Berlin to offer her spiritual consolation. Meisner, whose sermons in the palace chapel were open to the public, used the opportunity to stir up Lutheran passions against the Calvinists. The mood in Berlin became so tense that the viceroy of Brandenburg made an official complaint to Anna and insisted that he leave the country. But Meisner continued in his efforts (as he himself put it) to ‘blow away the Calvinist locusts’. In a pointed symbolic gesture, Anna had the corpse of her husband laid out in the Lutheran style with a crucifix in one hand, a detail that predictably lent credibility to rumours that the Elector had repudiated Calvinism and undergone a deathbed reconversion to Lutheranism.
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Only with Anna’s death in 1625 did the Electoral family achieve a measure of confessional harmony. Born in 1620, Frederick William (the future Great Elector) became the first Hohenzollern prince to grow up within an entirely Calvinist nuclear family.

It took a long time for the emotion to drain out of the Lutheran-Calvinist confrontation. Tension levels fluctuated with the ebb and flow of confessional polemic. During the years 1614–17, the controversy over John Sigismund’s conversion generated no fewer than 200 books and pamphlets circulating in Berlin, and the dissemination of Lutheran tracts condemning Calvinism remained a problem throughout the century.
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Care had to be taken to ensure that the dynastic ceremonies were designed to accommodate the expectations of both faiths. In terms of its public ceremony and symbolism, Brandenburg-Prussia evolved into a bi-confessional state.

The new Elector’s view of these matters was equivocal. On the one hand, he repeatedly assured his Lutheran subjects that he had no intention of forcing the conscience of any subject.
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On the other hand, he appears to have cherished the hope that the two camps would set aside their differences once they developed a fuller and truer understanding of each other’s positions (by which he really meant: if only the Lutherans could be brought to a fuller understanding of the Calvinist position). Frederick William hoped that a bi-confessional conference would facilitate ‘friendly and peaceful discussion’. The Lutherans were sceptical. They saw discussions of this kind as opening the door to a godless syncretism. ‘Spiritual war and conflict’, the Lutheran clergy of Königsberg observed sullenly in a joint letter of April 1642, were preferable to ‘a union of true doctrine with error and unbelief’.
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Predictably enough, a conference of Lutheran and Calvinist theologians which did actually meet at the Electoral palace in Berlin in 1663 merely sharpened the differences between the two camps and led to a new wave of mutual denunciations.

Throughout the reign, and especially from the early 1660s, the Electoral administration sought to keep the peace by forbidding theological polemic. Under an ‘edict of tolerance’ issued in September 1664, Calvinist and Lutheran clergymen were ordered to abstain from mutual disparagements; all preachers were required to signal their acceptance of this order by signing and returning a pre-circulated reply. In Berlin, two preachers who refused to do so were summarily dismissed from their livings; conversely, one preacher who did comply encountered such ill-will from his parishioners that his sermons remained unattended until his death shortly thereafter. Among those who were suspended for refusing to sign was Paul Gerhardt, greatest of the Lutheran hymnists.
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The most spectacular single incident was the arrest and incarceration of David Gigas, a Lutheran preacher at the Church of St Nikolai in Berlin. Gigas initially signed and returned the government questionnaire. Faced with a mutiny by his own parishioners, however, he reneged on his compliance and gave a rousing sermon on New Year’s Day 1667, in which he warned that religious coercion provoked ‘rebellions and
unhappy wars’. Gigas was arrested and carted off to the fortress at Spandau.
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If the confessional divide remained a live issue in the Hohenzollern lands, this was in part because it became entwined with the political struggle between the central administration and the holders of provincial power. In his battle against entrenched local privilege, the sovereign found himself face to face with Lutheran elites jealous of their rights and hostile to the unfamiliar confessional culture of the central government. Under these conditions Lutheranism, sustained institutionally by the network of local church patronage, became the ideology of provincial autonomy and resistance to central power. The Elector, for his part, never gave up working to reinforce the position of the Calvinist minority in the Hohenzollern lands – the great majority of around 18,000 Protestant immigrants who entered the Hohenzollern lands from France, the Palatinate and the Swiss cantons were adherents of the Reformed faith. Their presence helped to spread the influence of the Elector’s religion beyond the narrow confines of the court, but also provoked protests and complaints from the Lutheran elites. The conflict between centre and periphery that we associate with the ‘age of absolutism’ thus acquired a distinctive confessional flavour in Brandenburg-Prussia.

It has often been observed that the minority status of the dynasty and its Calvinist agents forced the political authorities in the Electorate to adopt a policy of tolerance in religious affairs. Tolerance was thereby ‘objectively’ built into the practice of government.
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It was also imposed as a principle of governance, where this was possible, on the provincial authorities. In 1668, for example, five years after the Estates of Ducal Prussia had formally accepted his sovereignty in the territory, Frederick William at last succeeded in forcing the three cities of Königsberg to allow Calvinists to acquire property and become citizens.
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This was tolerance in a very narrow sense, of course. It was more a matter of historical contingency and practical politics than of principle. Since it had nothing to do with the notion of minority rights in a present-day sense, it was not necessarily transferable to other minorities. Frederick William was opposed, for example, to the toleration of Catholics in the core territories of Brandenburg and Eastern Pomerania, but he accepted it in Ducal Prussia and the Hohenzollern territories of the Rhineland, where Catholics enjoyed the protection of historic treaties. The famous Edict of Potsdam (1685), by which Frederick William threw open the
doors of his lands to Huguenot (Calvinist) refugees fleeing from France, struck a blow for tolerance against persecution. But the same edict also included an article forbidding Brandenburg Catholics to attend mass in the chapels of the French and imperial ambassadors’ homes. In 1641, when Margrave Ernest, viceroy of Brandenburg, proposed that Frederick William might consider readmitting the Jews (expelled from the Electorate in 1571) as a means of alleviating the financial strains of the war, the latter replied that it was best to leave well enough alone – his ancestors must have had ‘sure and weighty reasons for extirpating the Jews from our Electorate’.
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