CHAP. IX.]

DIET OF WORMS, 1521.

373 possession of by the League as security for the expenses of the war (1519). In the following year the League, for a sum of 240,000 gulden handed over Würtemberg together with Ulrich's children, Christopher and Anne, to Ferdinand, who was then governing the Archduchy of Austria for his brother Charles, the Emperor Elect. Ulrich in vain appealed for protection to the Swiss, among whom he had taken refuge; and he wandered about in exile from Court to Court. Ferdinand, on taking possession of Würtemberg, confirmed the treaty of Tübingen, but exercised many oppressions in order to raise the sum he had agreed to pay. Charles, after his arrival in Germany, treated Würtemberg as his own property. He put Ulrich under the ban of the Empire, and heedless of the remonstrances raised on all sides, gave his dominions to Ferdinand, who some years later (1530) received the title of Duke of Würtemberg and Teck.

Several other important affairs were transacted at the Diet of Worms. The Imperial Chamber was reformed, the abuses of the lower courts were abolished, and a Council of Regency, consisting of a Lieutenant-General of the Empire and twenty-two Assessors, was appointed to discharge the Emperor's functions during his absence from Germany. As the right of primogeniture did not yet exist in Austria, Charles, according to his promise, ceded the greater part of the Austrian territories to his brother Ferdinand; who subsequently (in 1540) obtained the complete and hereditary possession of the whole of them. The Diet voted an army of 24,000 men to accompany Charles to Rome to receive the Imperial Crown; but on the express stipulation that these troops should be used for no other purpose than an escort, and to swell the pomp of his coronation."

The Diet of Worms, however, derives its chief importance from circumstances then considered as merely secondary; the affairs, namely, of a new heresy, and the appearance at Worms of Martin Luther. The Reformation had been going on some years in Germany; but as it had not till now become a political matter, we have hitherto abstained from adverting to it, in order to relate its progress in a connected form. And before entering on this subject, we will cast a brief retrospect on the state of the Church, and on the origin and development of that new learning which was to work so mighty a revolution in ecclesiastical affairs, and collaterally in the intercourse and policy of nations.

374

PROGRESS OF PAPAL POWER.

[CHAP. X.

AS

CHAPTER X.

S the rise and progress of Papal power have been traced by Mr. Hallam in his work on the Middle Ages, and as the preceding narrative has shown to what a pitch the pretensions of the Church were carried, both in spiritual and temporal matters, we need here only remind the reader of a few particulars. Towards the close of the thirteenth century, in the Pontificate of Boniface VIII., the last seal had been set to the claims of the Roman See. In a bull launched against the Emperor Albert I., Boniface styles himself "The Vicar of Jesus Christ, sitting on a lofty throne, to whom all power is given both in Heaven and on earth." In the constitution known as Unam Sanctam he declared that the Church had two swords, a spiritual and a temporal one; the first to be wielded by the Church itself, the second for the Church by Kings and their soldiers, but only at its bidding and during its pleasure. And he laid down as a necessary article of faith, that every human being is subject to the Roman Pontiff.2 In accordance with these principles, he showed himself at the first Jubilee in 1300 dressed in the Imperial robes, whilst two swords, typical of those referred to, were carried before him. Early in the same century, the spiritual army of the Church had been reinforced by the establishment of the Mendicant Orders, the Jesuits of the Mediæval Church, of which the principal were the Dominicans, or Friar preachers, and the Franciscans, or Friars Minor, founded severally by St. Dominic of Castile, and St. Francis of Assisi, in the Pontificate of Honorius III. (1216-27). The Franciscans were for the most part harmless fanatics, the Dominicans, on the contrary, the founders of the Inquisition, too often ferocious bigots.

In this age were also established the more recondite doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. The grand mystery of transubstantiation, by which the priest is supposed to work a constant miracle, was first formally and explicitly defined by the Fourth

1 Raynaldus, Ann. Eccl. ann. 1301 (t.iv. p. 302).

2 Extravag., lib. i. t. viii. c. i. Giannone, Storia di Napoli, xxi. 3.

CHAP. X.]

COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE, 1414.

375

Lateran General Council (1215). The practice of auricular confession carried the influence of the clergy into the innermost household, and the priest assumed the power of absolution and the command of the keys. The influence of the Pope was also wonderfully augmented by the dispensing power, which enabled him to release the greatest Sovereigns from an inconvenient oath or a disagreeable or impolitic marriage. The Roman See, however, naturally lost much of its influence, as well in Italy as in the rest of Europe, by the removal of the Papal Court to Avignon, in 1305, where it remained more than seventy years. This was the period of the attacks on the Church by Italian writers, as well as by many in England in the reign of Edward III., and of the rise in that country of the Wicliffites, or Lollards.

The schism which ensued soon after the restoration of the Papal residence to Rome by Gregory XI. in 1376, was also most prejudicial to the Papacy. After the death of Gregory, through dissensions among the Cardinals, the tiara was claimed by a Pope and an Antipope. The Council of Pisa, assembled to decide this dispute, in 1409, only more embroiled the fray. It deposed both the rival Popes, Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII., and elected Alexander V. in their place; but as the deposed Popes found many adherents, the only result was three infallible heads of the Church instead of two, all at variance with one another. It became necessary, therefore, to appeal to another Council, which was assembled at Constance in 1414.

This assembly found something more to decide than the claims of these wrangling Pontiffs, whose quarrels had excited the aversion of all thinking men, clerical as well as lay, and had given birth to two separate projects of reform: one within the Church, the other without. A very considerable portion of the transmontane clergy who assembled at Constance were desirous of effecting a moderate reform; and as they agreed to vote by nations, and not per capita, or individually, which would have given a preponderance to the Italian clergy, they were enabled to carry some of their resolutions.2 They appointed a Reform Committee, whose resolutions might have eventually counteracted the more glaring

1 The Roman Pontiff never assumed the power of divorcing if matrimony had been lawfully contracted. Papal divorces always went on the ground of the nullity of a marriage ab initio, from some canonical impediment. We shall have a case in point in the matter of King Henry VIII.'s divorce.

2 In this assembly, England obtained an independent national vote, much to the annoyance of the French, who maintained that England should be classed with Germany, like Denmark and Sweden. See L'Enfant, Hist. du Conc. de Constance, ap. Hallam, Mid. Ages, vol. ii. p. 244.

376

WICLIFFITES AND HUSSITES.

[CHAP. X.

abuses of the Papacy; and they made the famous declaration, that the authority of a General Council is superior to that of the Pope. It may well be doubted, however, whether the power of the Roman See could have been ever effectually broken without a reform of doctrine; and of this some of the ecclesiastics who were strenuous against the Papal abuses were the most violent opponents.

The more thorough movement from without, begun by Wiclif, though arrested, was not suppressed. Many causes had hindered the success of that reformation. The times were not yet ripe for it: Wiclif himself was scarcely of the true temper for a great reformer; and his attempt was damaged, first by the weakness of Richard II. and then by the revolution which overthrew that King. Although Richard curbed the Papal power by passing an act of præmunire, he at the same time enacted statutes against the Lollards, forbade the teaching of their doctrines at Oxford, and suppressed their conventicles in London. Thus he alienated at once the reformers and Romanists, and fell an easy prey to Henry of Lancaster, whose invasion was invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury in person. The reign of the Church was now firmly settled in England, and under Henry IV. heresy was made a capital offence. But through the connection of Bohemia and England by the marriage of Richard with Anne of Bohemia, sister of King Wenceslaus, the doctrines of Wiclif had spread to that country, and had taken root there before the preaching of Huss. Conrad Waldhäuser and Militz had preached those doctrines towards the end of the fourteenth century; though Matthias of Janow, a canon of Prague Cathedral, who died in 1394, must be more especially regarded as the forerunner of Huss. The new doctrines received further impulse in Bohemia through Jerome of Prague, who had studied at Oxford. Some of the English Wicliffites also took refuge in that country; and we find among them one Peter Payne, who had been obliged to fly from Oxford on account of his principles, and was subsequently one of the Taborite deputies who attended the Council of Basle in 1433. Huss carried his tenets almost as far as Luther did afterwards. He appealed to the Scriptures as the only standard of faith, denounced indulgences, and held in 1412 a public disputation against them. His friend Jerome of Prague and others burnt, like Luther afterwards, the Papal bulls under the gallows, a Palacky, Gesch. von Böhmen, B. iii. S. 275.

2

Turner, Hist. of England, vol. ii.

p. 125.

CHAP. X.]

HUSS AND JEROME BURNT.

377

description of which scene is still extant in the manuscript of a contemporary student.' In fact, Luther's Reformation was only a reproduction, under more favourable circumstances, though not an imitation, of those of Wiclif and Huss. The Hussite doctrines never penetrated over the frontier of Bohemia; they were, in fact, a sort of national re-action against German domination in that land. The Germans regarded the Bohemian Hussites with aversion, and a devastating war was for fifteen years carried on between them. At this time Bohemia was superior to Germany in literary culture. The University of Prague, the earliest in the Empire, was founded in 1350 by the Emperor Charles IV., and in 1408 is said to have contained 30,000 students and 200 professors. Of the students about 4,000 were Germans, who sided with the Pope; and when their privileges were curtailed in 1409 by King Wenceslaus, they quitted Prague and migrated to the newly founded University of Leipsic (1409).

The reforming party in the Council of Constance was principally led by French ecclesiastics, among whom three names are conspicuous above the rest; those of John Gerson, Nicholas of Clémanges, Rector of the University of Paris, and Peter d'Ailly, Cardinal-Bishop of Cambray. Clémanges had written before 1413 his lashing little work De corrupto Ecclesiæ statu, which Michelet likens to Luther's Captivity of Babylon. The object of these reformers, however, was merely to establish an ecclesiastical oligarchy in place of the absolute power of the Pope. They could never pardon Huss his attacks upon the hierarchy. They were his bitterest enemies; and it was for these attacks, rather than for their imputed heresies, that Huss and Jerome of Prague died. This judicial murder produced a reproachful letter to the Council signed by no fewer than 452 Bohemian nobles; to which the Fathers answered by summoning the subscribers before them, and on their non-appearance denouncing them as heretics. It is proof to how great an extent the Hussite doctrines had spread in Bohemia that the name of Bohemian became synonymous with heretic. The internal dissensions of the Hussites themselves alone prevented the establishment of a Reformation in that country. The tenets of the moderate party, called Calixtines or Utraquists, and subsequently the Prague Party, had been publicly adopted by the University of Prague; but, as commonly happens in all great revolutions, whether political or religious, their cause. was injured by various extreme sects of desperate and dreaming 1 Palacky, Gesch. von Böhmen, B. iii. p. 278. 2 Hist. de France, t. vi. p. 204.