The Tudors (56 page)

Both in background and in temperament, Calvin was profoundly different from Luther. He was trained in the law rather than in theology, and much of his impact was rooted in a lawyerly impulse to systematize, to impose order on what can sometimes seem the
dis
order, the emotional excess, of Luther’s attacks first on the abuses of the church and then on some of its doctrines. Born in 1509 (the family name was Cauvin, Latinized as “Calvinus” when young Jean began putting his ideas in writing), he was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother but came of age in a France that was being shaken apart by the disputes that Luther had ignited. He was drawn to the cause of reform while still a student in Paris, where he began acquiring the mastery of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew that would make him one of Europe’s most formidable Scripture scholars. The beliefs that he adopted at this early stage were, not surprisingly, almost identical to what Luther was then preaching. Thus he agreed with Luther’s view that original sin had so damaged the human soul as to make it impossible for anyone to
merit
salvation and that man was therefore entirely dependent upon a divine grace that cannot be earned. Like Luther, he repudiated most of the traditional sacraments (all, in fact, except baptism and the Eucharist) along with the practices (celibacy, fasting, pilgrimages, and indulgences, for example) that the Catholic Church had long offered as ways of winning divine favor. Throughout his public life Calvin displayed a hatred of Rome at least as intense as Luther’s, but he never descended to the kind of childishly scatological rhetoric with which the German reformer defaced so much of his own writing. (Thomas More and others, to their own everlasting shame, answered him in kind.)

Theologically, Calvin soon went beyond Luther. He is best known for making explicit something that had remained implicit in Luther: the conclusion that, because fallen man has no free will and can do nothing to win salvation or escape damnation, some are predestined to be saved while others are predestined for hell. The saved are the
elect
, in Calvin’s system. Though they can be recognized by their acceptance of divine truth, their love of the Eucharist, and their upright conduct, these are not the
means
by which they achieve salvation but rather a
sign
of election. Calvin’s notion of “double predestination”—of some being marked for damnation just as surely as others are fated for salvation—has too often been regarded as the centerpiece of his theology. It is said to have made his God a kind of insanely cruel monster and to explain the severity of the regimen that Calvin imposed upon Geneva. In fact, however, Calvin regarded predestination as logically inescapable but otherwise beyond human understanding and in practical terms not of great importance. It was his followers who, after his death, moved predestination closer to the center of “Calvinist” belief. Calvin’s own view was that the idea of predestination should make it possible for believers to set aside their anxieties about earning salvation and put their trust in the mercy of a gentle, compassionate divine father (who was also, Calvin suggested, a loving mother). Calvin was generally disinclined to take a passionate interest in theological questions that consumed many of his contemporaries but seemed to him to have little practical value in addressing the needs of the elect. He finessed one of the most contentious of issues, for example, by declaring that Christ was really present in the Eucharist but only in a “spiritual” sense, and letting it go at that. He regarded the heart as more important than the intellect in establishing a right relationship with God.

What separated Calvin from the Lutherans most radically, at least in terms of practical consequences, was his approach to the governance of the church as well as—church and state being inextricably connected in his system—the civil society. Luther, in renouncing the traditional church, had discarded Catholic belief in a priesthood endowed with special authority and unique sacramental faculties. In its place he offered a “priesthood of all believers,” and while acknowledging the church as a legitimately distinct element of society, he emphatically subordinated it (especially after the Peasants’ War) to civil authority. For
Calvin, by contrast, the church and its clergy retained a unique authority, with not only the right but the duty to reshape the world in such a way as to make it a fit habitation for the elect. Hence one of the defining characteristics of Calvinism (and the Puritanism to which it gave rise in England): a zealous commitment to making the world a fully realized part of Christ’s kingdom. Curiously, people who believed they could do nothing to alter their eternal destinies nevertheless dedicated themselves to making everyone in the world conduct themselves in a holy manner as Calvin defined holiness. This was a matter of duty, and its aim was not to save souls but to protect the elect from the doomed.

Calvin’s whole career was an expression of commitment to a Christian reordering of society. He came early to be certain not only that Catholicism was a gross perversion of the gospel—his contempt for the old religion appears at times to border on the pathological—but that he himself, by reading Scripture correctly, had found in it truths that European Christianity had either intentionally suppressed or, more charitably, remained blind to for more than a thousand years. Among his recovered truths were highly specific instructions as to how the church and the community of believers should be organized and managed. It was of course extraordinary, his conviction that virtually all of Christendom had been grievously in error almost from the beginning and that he alone was free of error. On its face it was outlandish. But in the theological confusion of the sixteenth century, Calvin’s impregnable self-confidence and the clarity of his ideas brought him an eager audience.

Most of his core ideas were already in place when, in 1536, Calvin happened to make an overnight stop in Geneva and was persuaded to remain there and join the embattled local forces of reform. He quickly showed himself to be the most unhesitating and uncompromising of crusaders, answering disagreement with scorn and demanding that everyone in the city either assent to his beliefs or face excommunication and expulsion. During his first months in Geneva he published the first edition of his
Institutes of the Christian Religion
, which as it evolved would become arguably the most important single work in the history of Protestantism. When after two years he insisted that the city council submit to the authority of the clergy—to
his
authority, in effect—he found that he had overreached. Now it was he who was sent into exile.

Geneva remained a religious cockpit, however, and the most ambitious
of its reformers soon were yearning once again for strong leadership. In 1541 Calvin was invited to return. He did so on very nearly his own terms, demanding that the council enact and enforce his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, and from that point until the end of his life twenty-three years later he outmaneuvered one after another of his adversaries until Geneva became the Sparta of Protestant Europe. His rules were not only given the force of law but declared “holy doctrine”—infallible, or something not easily distinguished from it. The regime that he imposed was democratic in the sense that church members chose their pastors, but once chosen, those pastors, working with and through lay elders, were able to rule virtually unchallenged. Eventually Calvin’s consistory, an ecclesiastical court presided over by the pastors, was empowered to investigate and discipline anyone in the city. Not only drunkenness, gambling, and sexual promiscuity but dancing, singing outside church, swearing, and failing to attend sermons became crimes. Catholic practice, of course, was absolutely forbidden. Punishments ranged from reprimands and public confession to beatings, banishment, even execution. In a five-year period toward the end of Calvin’s career, fifty-eight Genevans were sentenced to death, seventy-six exiled.

Calvin became a major force in England’s religious evolution without really trying to do so. Many of the evangelicals who could not accept Henry VIII’s quasi-Catholic Church had taken up exile in Geneva, where Calvin’s mind and personality powerfully affected their beliefs. When they flooded back into England after Edward VI’s accession, they carried a white-hot Calvinist fervor with them. They formed the nucleus of what would become a potent new element in English national life. They sparked a movement that knew what it wanted, knew that it was right, knew that its opposition was damnably wrong in the most literal sense, and was not inclined to compromise.

A Revolution and a Coup

E
dward Tudor was fifteen and a half years old when, on the second day of April 1552, he suddenly fell ill. His physicians were of course concerned, especially when it became clear that he had not only measles (a dangerous disease into the twentieth century) but smallpox to boot. The men who were ruling in the young king’s name had reason to be more worried than the doctors. If Edward died, everything they had achieved, both for themselves and for their faith, would be at risk. If he were followed on the throne by his half-sister Mary, next in line under Henry VIII’s final arrangements, they could expect little better than disaster. However, the boy’s recovery was swift and soon seemed complete, and in short order everyone was breathing easier.

On the brink of manhood now, Edward was taking an increasingly conspicuous part in the management of the kingdom. Under the indulgent tutelage of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and lord president of the Privy Council, he gave every evidence of developing into a formidable monarch. He had the Tudor intelligence, and like his father and sisters he was being given the rigorous training in languages, the classics, and theology that Renaissance Europe deemed appropriate to royalty. From early childhood he had been schooled in a very particular view of the world and his place in it, and he embraced everything he was taught: that his authority came directly from God, so that he was accountable to no living person; that God had given him dominion over
the English church no less than over the state; that as God’s vicar he had a solemn responsibility to establish true Christianity throughout his realm; and that the only true Christianity was the evangelical faith of his godfather Cranmer and his tutors. Having been raised and educated by passionate anti-Catholics who scorned tradition—even his stepmother Catherine Parr believed that God had chosen her to be Henry’s sixth queen so that she could do her part in fending off the dark forces of superstition—he was a firm believer in justification by faith, in predestination, and in other things that his father had never ceased to abominate. Things that Henry had never stopped believing, on the other hand, were now Edward’s abominations. And he displayed the eager combativeness of the incipient Puritan—a determination to engage the world and transform it into God’s kingdom. Francis van der Delft, the Catholic ambassador of the doggedly Catholic Charles V, reported dryly that “in the court there is no man of learning so ready to argue in support of the new doctrine as the king, according to what his masters tell him and he learns from his preachers.”

In fact, however, by 1552 Edward was no one’s mere puppet. As early as 1550, barely in adolescence, he had delighted his mentors and horrified the court’s remaining conservatives by demanding the removal of any invocation of the saints (veneration of saints having become an obnoxious vestige of the old religion) from the consecration oath taken by new bishops. By that time, too, Edward was objecting to the masses being said in his sister Mary’s household, refusing to agree when his advisers suggested that it would be better to turn a blind eye to such practices than to provoke the wrath of her cousin the emperor. The mass was sinful, Edward insisted, and if he tolerated sinfulness he himself would sin. England’s second Reformation was thus now fully under way, and it had no advocate more enthusiastic than the young king himself. It was in every respect a revolution from above, driven by a council whose conservative members had been either purged or politically neutered. With the power of the Crown at its back, it was gathering momentum in spite of having feeble support in the population or even the clergy at large. The narrowness of its base is suggested by the fact that the Canterbury and York convocations of the clergy were never asked to approve or even express an opinion about the changes being made. They were not regarded as trustworthy.

The revolution’s main driver was Cranmer, whose changing beliefs had by this time carried him beyond the Lutheranism of his earlier years and to the more radical austerities of Swiss, and specifically Calvinist, reform. He achieved perhaps the greatest triumph of his career in 1552, when Parliament passed the Second Act of Uniformity and thereby mandated the use of his reworked (by himself) Prayer Book. If the earlier 1549 edition, issued before the evangelicals were sufficiently entrenched to disregard conservative opposition, had been an equivocal thing, a stopgap that satisfied no one and that exasperated the most ambitious of the reformers, the revision, or rather its adoption by Parliament, signaled the all-but-total victory of what now could be called the English Protestant church. Services cleansed of all vestiges of tradition—prayers for the dead, any mention of saints, the old familiar music and clerical vestments—became compulsory for laity and clergy alike. Harsh penalties were imposed: six months imprisonment for being present at any service not in conformity with the new law, a year for a second offense, life for a third. In other ways, too, Parliament brought to an end the liberality that had marked the beginning of the new regime (a pro forma liberality that in practice had been extended to the evangelicals only). Once again it was made treason to deny not only the royal supremacy but any prescribed article of faith. More positively, the provisions by which Henry VIII had permitted treason convictions on the basis of testimony from a single witness, prevented defendants from facing their accusers, and prescribed the death sentence for any first offense were expunged by Parliament. Henceforth the death penalty could be imposed for a first offense only if the treasonous statements were expressed in “writing, printing, carving or graving.” Treason by spoken word was punishable by imprisonment and loss of possessions for first and second offenses, with a third conviction required for execution. Edward’s regime, if not exactly a national liberation, continued to be not nearly as bloody as his father’s.