Patterns of Princely Reformation

To understand the political significance of the reformation process in Germany in a broader comparative context, it will be useful to examine briefly the “princely” reformations that took place simultaneously in Scandinavia and England. In terms of sheer numbers of ordinary people whose religious experience was transformed by the reformation process, the princely reformations in northern Germany and beyond were obviously more important than the popular urban reformations since in most of Europe only a small minority of the population lived in cities.^[22] It would be as misleading, however, to imagine a singular “princely” type of reformation as it is to posit a uniform and unchanging experience of urban reformation. Here we will take as our point of departure the assumption that a princely reformation is one in which the reform of religious ritual and belief occurred with at least the tacit support of the territorial lord or prince. Given this obviously broad and inclusive baseline, it will be possible not only to describe a range of variation in princely reformations but also to underscore once again the importance of popular engagement in the political process of reformation. In Scandinavia alone, Ole Peter Grell (1992, 1995) distinguishes three different patterns of princely reformation: in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein and in the composite monarchies of Denmark/ Norway and Sweden/Finland. But before we look at each in turn, we need to recognize their common historical background in the Union of Scandinavian Kingdoms.

Originally the dynastic achievement in 1397 of the Danish queen, Margrethe I, the Union of Scandinavian Kingdoms (including Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, along with Finland and the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein) was at the beginning of the sixteenth century on the verge of collapse (Kirby 1990; Metcalf 1995). Christian II’s aggressive attempts to consolidate his control over this vast dynastic composite served only to antagonize both the lay and the ecclesiastical elites whose authority at the local and regional levels he threatened (Grell 1995). Following the massacre of some eighty lay and ecclesiastical lords in Stockholm in 1520, a noble revolt led by Gustav Vasa reestablished the independence of the Swedish kingdom in 1521, with Vasa as regent.^[23] Meanwhile, the growing opposition of the Danish aristocracy led in 1523 to the overthrow and exile of Christian II, followed by the election of Duke Frederik of Schleswig and Holstein, Christian’s uncle, as king. Gustav Vasa and Frederik I, as usurpers, had a common interest in preventing the return of Christian II, and despite Gustav’s suspicion that Frederik sought to reunite the composite under the Danish Crown, they cooperated to fend off Christian’s intermittent attacks until his final defeat in 1532. It was against this backdrop of political instability and uncertainty—what we might regard as a classic political crisis within a composite state—that the Protestant Reformation first took root in Scandinavia.

The duchies of Schleswig and Holstein illustrate the enormous political complexities of late medieval dynasticism. The duke of Holstein was a vassal of the German-Roman Empire while the duke of Schleswig was a vassal of Denmark, but in 1460 the two units had been declared to be administratively “inseparable and indivisible” (Lausten 1995). Under Christian II, the duchies had been ruled separately by Duke Frederik, but with his election as king they were once again brought closer to the Danish kingdom. In 1525, Frederik’s son, Christian, who eventually succeeded to the Danish throne as Christian III, took over administration of Haderslev and Tönning, which were part of the duchy of Schleswig, and it was under his sponsorship that Lutheranism was first institutionalized in the region (Grell 1992; Lausten 1995). Although there had been evangelical preachers in the area since 1521, where possible Christian intervened directly to dismiss prelates opposed to reform, to appoint evangelical preachers, to provide training for evangelical pastors, and to design new ecclesiastical regulations—first in Haderslev alone, but after 1526 (when he became regent of the two duchies) more generally in Schleswig and Holstein. By 1528, according to Grell (1992: 97), the “Reformation was a fait accompli ” when the Synod at Haderslev, called by Christian, enacted the Haderslev Church Ordinance. One of the first of what would be many Lutheran church ordinances in Europe, the Haderslev Church Ordinance was intended to guide the parish clergy in their pastoral activities; besides advising the ministers to preach the Gospel as spelled out by Luther, it obliged them to swear an oath of allegiance to the duke.

Within the small domain of Haderslev (and more generally in Schleswig and Holstein), a modest popular base aligned with the active support of the local lord was sufficient to prevail over the modest opposition of the episcopal establishment. The result was an essentially peaceful and official reform with a strong dose of civil regulation of formerly ecclesiastical affairs such as education and poor relief. Within the larger kingdom of Denmark, by contrast, the political dynamics of the reformation process were significantly different. In the first place, King Frederik owed his position to the combined lay and ecclesiastical elite who had deposed his nephew; indeed, according to the coronation charter that he was required to sign in 1523, Frederik promised, “[We will] not allow any heretics, disciples of Luther or others to preach and teach, either openly or secretly, against God, the faith of the Holy Church, the holiest father, the Pope, or the Catholic Church, but where they are found in this Kingdom, We promise to punish them on life and property” (quoted in Grell 1992: 104). Though Frederik clearly violated this oath in several instances, he was nevertheless forced in some measure to honor it at least publicly as long as the return of Christian II, who had converted to Lutheranism in exile, was a real threat. Consequently, the process of reformation in Denmark proceeded more clearly from the bottom up, building on the base of popular reformation coalitions in the cities (see Grell 1992; Lausten 1995). The earliest successes of popular evangelical preaching were in the small city of Viborg in Jutland where Hans Tausen, a former member of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, was able to build up a popular following and a colleague, Jorgen Jensen Sadolin, established a school for evangelical preachers in 1526; both men were supported by royal letters of protection, granted at the request of local magistrates.^[24]

In the same year, a Danish Herredag (Parliament) meeting in Odense transformed the Catholic church in Denmark into a national church as a means of dealing with clerical abuse without transforming religious practice; in practice this meant that locally appointed bishops were not to seek confirmation from Rome and that revenues that had earlier been sent to Rome should now flow to the Crown. In the following year, however, Frederik publicly proclaimed a neutral stance with regard to matters of ritual and belief, declaring that “‘the Holy Christian Faith is free’ and that he governed ‘life and property, not the soul’” (Grell 1992: 106). With this kind of tacit support, the evangelicals gathered strength in Viborg, appropriating the Franciscan and Dominican monasteries for their own use, closing down many parish churches, and restricting Catholic worship to the Cathedral; by the end of 1529, public disturbances had ended public Catholic worship altogether. Meanwhile, the reform-minded magistracy of Malmö in Scania (today part of Sweden) began actively recruiting evangelical preachers. At first evangelical preaching was only allowed outside the walls of the town, but as the services became more popular they were moved into a chapel and finally a larger church. The reform movement suffered a temporary setback in Malmö in 1528 when the archbishop of Lund threatened the magistrates with a heresy trial, but by 1529, again with the tacit approval of the king, the evangelical preachers and magistrates of Malmö were emboldened sufficiently to seize church properties, including the mendicant houses, and to rid the city of a restive Catholic minority (Grell 1988, 1990). By 1530 the evangelical reform movement had gained a significant following in all the towns and cities of Denmark (Lausten 1995), but in Copenhagen it had been denied comparable political success, in part because of the strong defense of the Catholic establishment by the local bishop. At the same time, however, the effectiveness of popular support for religious reform was deflected by factionalism that paralyzed the municipal council. Although there were at least four evangelical preachers in the city and the city council had managed to take over most of the monasteries, Copenhagen remained divided between Protestants and Catholics prior to Christian II’s last attempt to regain his throne in 1531—this time with the support of his brother-in-law, Charles V of Habsburg, at whose insistence Christian had reconverted to Catholicism.

The final defeat and arrest of Christian II in 1532 might have signaled the beginning of a more comprehensive princely reformation had it not been for the untimely death of Frederik I. When a conservative minority of aristocrats on the royal council prevented the immediate election of Frederick’s Lutheran son, Duke Christian of Schleswig and Holstein, the stage was set for civil war: the Grevens Fejde, which was precipitated by the revolt of Malmö against the royal council, ostensibly in defense of its municipal reformation (cf. Grell 1988). Although the aristocrats quickly backed down and elected Christian a month later, the alliance of Malmö and (more reluctantly) Copenhagen with the Hanseatic cities of northern Germany defined the essentially political struggle between the king and key elements of his composite domain (with both sides supporting Lutheranism) until Copenhagen finally surrendered in 1536. Once Christian III had won the war, he immediately imprisoned the Catholic bishops and summoned a parliament, composed of an unusually large number of gentry, burghers, and peasants, to create a Lutheran territorial Church (Metcalf 1995). In light of its broad base of popular support after a full decade of evangelical preaching, especially in the cities, the Church Ordinance of 1537 proved to be an excellent tool for Christian III, in the wake of nearly two decades of political instability, to consolidate his “sovereignty” in a remarkably uniform and direct fashion throughout his domain.

In the kingdom of Sweden, the reformation process followed yet another course (Grell 1992; Kouri 1995; see also Roberts 1968). Though Gustav Vasa is often said to have been less keenly interested in evangelical religion than his Danish counterparts, that he charted a far more hesitant course toward the creation of a Lutheran national church reflects real political constraints as well. For our purposes, what is most telling is the general consensus that evangelical preaching failed to build a broad base of popular support for the cause of religious reformation in either Sweden or Finland. Thus popular support for the Protestant cause was strongest in Stockholm, particularly among the large German population, which was always in some sense suspect because of its extensive ties with the (Lutheran) Hanseatic cities of the Baltic coast. By the same token, prior to 1540 Vasa was faced repeatedly with rural uprisings that not only protested the heavy taxation that Vasa demanded to repay the significant debts he incurred in fighting for Swedish independence but also defended traditional Catholic religious practice. The latter reflected, in all likelihood, not so much a generalized peasant conservatism as the considerable success of Catholic priests in gaining popular support by identifying with peasant grievances against the fiscal exactions of the new monarch (Kouri 1995).^[25]

To be sure, none of this prevented Vasa from “nationalizing” the Swedish Church as a means of solving his financial difficulties. Indeed, very early on Vasa began secularizing monastic lands, claiming that “the church consisted of all believers and that its resources had been given for public ends: in other words the church’s wealth belonged to the nation” (Grell 1992: 113). In 1527, despite rural unrest, a Riksdag (Parliament) meeting at Västeras forced the return of ecclesiastical fiefs to the Crown. Significantly, as part of this bargain, the king took over the administration of all lay properties belonging to monasteries and the Church, but the lay nobility was allowed to reclaim all properties donated to the Church since 1454.^[26] Still, in response to the ongoing danger of popular opposition, Vasa promised to retain the religious status quo, claiming that modest changes in religious ceremonies and ecclesiastical discipline (a “compromise” enacted by the national synod in 1529) had neither been forbidden nor enforced by him. When the national synod went even further in the 1530s to mandate that all services be conducted in Swedish and that Swedish manuals be used for baptisms and marriage, royal directives pointed out that the clergy were not empowered to introduce religious changes; the king also attacked the most prominent spokesmen for an independent evangelical church (indeed, they were his former advisers) for “failing to teach obedience towards secular authority” (Grell 1992: 116). Finally, the Riksdag meeting at Örebro in 1539 authorized the king to take full control of the Swedish Church, and the king, as “protector of the Holy Christian faith in the whole kingdom,” promptly issued instructions for a new Church government. Still, throughout Gustav Vasa’s reign (1528–1560), the Swedish Church managed to accommodate a variety of theological tendencies and ritual styles. It did not adopt a full Protestant church order until 1571, and it was not until 1593 that it adopted a strictly Lutheran theology (Kouri 1995).

As these three cases suggest, “princely” reformations, too, were complex political processes that yielded a variety of often transient outcomes that served primarily to structure the next round of interaction rather than to freeze any particular state of affairs. For our purposes, it is particularly important to note that the different dynamics evident in the reformation processes in Schleswig/Holstein, Denmark, and Sweden reflect variations both in the relative strength of reformation coalitions and in the size and character of the political spaces within which they interacted with a variety of “sovereigns.” In all three cases, it is important to recognize the political significance of popular support for the evangelical cause, but to judge by the contrasting experiences of Denmark and Sweden, in large composite states a substantial base of popular mobilization was the sine qua non of a thoroughgoing transformation of religious ritual and belief. Conversely, it was only in the relatively compact space of a semiautonomous feudal principality like Haderslev that a thoroughgoing reformation of religious practice and ecclesiastical politics could be enacted experimentally, largely from above.

Turning finally to England, it would seem that the better-known events of the English Reformation in general and the Pilgrimage of Grace in particular would easily fit within this range of variation. To be sure, it is no more possible to summarize the rich results of the last thirty years of research on England’s experience of religious reformation than it is to do justice to the richness of reformation research on Germany and Scandinavia.^[27] Much has changed in the way historians approach and disagree about the reformation in England, but for our purposes there are two new perspectives that are particularly important. First, much like students of Germany and Scandinavia, historians of the English Reformation have moved away from grand explanations of a singular “event” or even a discrete set of events; instead they are more likely to imagine an especially long and drawn-out political process, full of contingency and spiced with dramatic reversals of fortune, in which the transformation of ecclesiastical politics—that is, the formal separation of the Church of England from Rome—was distinct from the reformation of religious practice, not unlike the Swedish experience in this regard. At the very least, according to Christopher Haigh, one can say that England experienced a whole complex of discontinuous and parallel reformations: “There were three political Reformations: a Henrican political Reformation between 1530 and 1538, much of it reversed between 1538 and 1546; an Edwardian political Reformation between 1547 and 1553, almost completely reversed [by Queen Mary] between 1553 and 1558; and an Elizabethan political reformation between 1559 and 1563—which was not reversed” (1993: 14). Haigh goes on to distinguish a parallel “evangelical” reformation: “The Protestant Reformation of individual conversions by preachers and personal contacts, the Reformation which began in London, Cambridge, and Oxford from about 1520, and was never completed” (ibid.).

The political process of these transient and discontinuous political reformations includes a whole series of well-known skirmishes and showdowns among different kinds of rulers: between high churchmen and royal officials; between different claimants to national political and religious sovereignty; between national claimants and local rulers. But as the recent literature has shown, the political processes of the English reformations also emphatically included ordinary people. Again, Haigh summarizes the results:

“People” mattered in these Reformations because they were there and they took part. Sometimes, some rebelled: in 1536, 1549, 1554, and 1569 there were major risings caused partly by religious discontents; there were lesser but potentially dangerous disorders in 1537, 1541, 1548, and 1570. Sometimes, and especially in London, some actively advanced the cause of Reformation, pulling down images in 1547, mocking the mass in 1548, pulling down altars in 1550. Some were converted by Protestant proselytizing; some were outraged by such heresy, resorting to personal violence or informing to authority. And everywhere, always, people obeyed or did not obey rules of Reformation or de-Reformation, and their obedience or disobedience is Reformation history. (Ibid., 19)

Here again there is much that is familiar about the English reformations: the critical importance of popular engagement; the broad range of possible responses, from individual acts of disobedience to mass collective action; the episodic quality of large-scale action. The point, however, is not to make the English reformations look just like all others but to use the peculiarities of the English experience to highlight critical aspects of the Reformation era more generally.

In this regard, I should like to return to the story with which I introduced the English Reformation at the beginning of this chapter, the Pilgrimage of Grace. In 1536, amid the first of the political reformations—the Henrican reformation in which the Church of England was separated from Rome and monastic property was expropriated by the Crown—large numbers of ordinary English subjects chose to protest the fiscal demands of their government and took up arms in defense of their parish churches. Imagine the scene. In the summer and fall of 1536, royal commissioners were fanning out throughout the kingdom, closing monasteries, suppressing superfluous saints’ days and popular festivals, and allegedly confiscating the movable wealth of local churches. The very embodiment of “negative confiscatory policies which seemed to be the hallmark of the changes of the 1530s” (Davies 1985: 83), these agents of a distant but very aggressive sovereign met with a variety of forms of resistance ranging from passive noncooperation to humble petitions and direct threats, but at the beginning of October a relatively minor confrontation at Louth in Lincolnshire set off a chain of events by which rumors, alarms, and musters called tens of thousands of ordinary people into action in defense variously of God, faith, Church, king, and the common good. A great assembly of these common folk at Lincoln boldly supported a series of demands, drafted by the gentry, regarding taxation, heresy, suppression of monasteries, punishment of those responsible for oppression, and pardon for the rebels, but when the king refused to negotiate, the aristocratic leaders of the movement persuaded the commoner to disperse within ten days of the original incident.

A parallel movement farther north in Yorkshire shared many of the symbols, goals, and oaths of the Lincolnshire mobilization but proved to be considerably more organized and durable. Led by an obscure and slightly mysterious lawyer, Robert Aske, this “Pilgrimage of Grace” eventually mobilized more than twenty thousand men who represented a significant challenge to the fiscal and ecclesiastical reform policies of King Henry. On October 16 rebels from throughout Yorkshire and beyond converged on York and entered the city. From there the forces marched under the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ (a crusading symbol) to Pontefract, where Lord Darcy surrendered the royal castle and joined the rebellion, and on toward Doncaster where they confronted a small royal army. Though some of the rebels wanted to march all the way to London, on October 27 the royal and rebel armies agreed to a truce, in the expectation of negotiations with the king, and most of the rebel army disbanded, though Aske and his fellow leaders remained in effective governmental control of the north.

Once again Henry was inclined to refuse negotiations, but it was clear to his advisers that he had little choice but to offer to negotiate. Consequently hundreds of representatives of the rebel movement met in late November and early December to formulate a statement of their grievances. As in the German peasant assemblies of 1525, a variety of economic and political issues mingled somewhat awkwardly with administrative and religious issues, but it is clear that it was the religious issues and symbolism and the common defense of a locally integrated church that bound the uneasy coalition of ordinary people and elite leaders together (Davies 1985). Finally formal negotiations at Doncaster on December 6 appeared to yield significant royal concessions, and on December 8 Aske convinced the pilgrims to go home. Later, when it became obvious that the rebels had been duped and that the king had no intention of satisfying their demands, an unsuccessful attempt to re-create the initial mobilization called forth a violent repression in which many of the gentry elite who had initially joined this broadly based regional coalition against the king’s reform polices now participated in rounding up and executing nearly two hundred rebel leaders.

In the most general sense, the Pilgrimage of Grace highlights the reality of popular opposition to the reformation process. Largely invisible, especially during the first phase of the European Reformation, because it so often took the form of individual acts of disobedience, opposition was nevertheless predictable, if for no other reason than that the religious questions of the day divided people at all levels of society. Even more, then, the political process by which the Reformation was enacted was sure to divide rather than unite people for whom the Reformation entailed much more than shifting religious sensibilities. This is, of course, the essence of what it means to say that religion and politics were inextricably entwined. Moreover, the political struggles of the reformation process not only required ordinary political subjects to make choices they might rather have avoided, but it taught them willy-nilly how (and how not) to be political. In short, despite all the research that focuses on popular support for the reformation of religion, we must remember that this was always a matter of choice and that in choosing either for or against the Reformation ordinary people entered a much larger political process in which even apparently modest and essentially private choices in one round of interaction laid down the parameters of choice for the next round.^[28]

In a more specific sense, the Pilgrimage of Grace—precisely because it affected the form of a pilgrimage toward the center of power—highlights the critical relationship between the scale of popular collective action and the qualities of the political space in which the power to reform “religion and regime” was being contested. In 1536 the people of Yorkshire were fighting a whole complex of battles simultaneously, the points at issue ranging from enclosures of commons land to the preservation of monastic communities (Elton 1980; Fletcher 1983; Davies 1984, 1985). But what is striking, from a broader comparative perspective, is that these battles were being fought within the political space defined by an almost uniquely uncomplicated monarchy. To be sure, England had previously been the core of a much more complex composite state that spanned the English Channel, and it would soon serve again as the core of a composite that included Ireland and Scotland. By 1536, however, the political incorporation of England and Wales was more or less secure, and for the time being the political dimensions of England were remarkably simple. In this political context, the constituent unit of popular mobilization was still the local community—as it was elsewhere in Europe—but the effective arena for political contestation regarding the critical questions of “religion and regime” had effectively been “nationalized” inasmuch as the pilgrims of Yorkshire sought the redress of their grievances from their royal—as opposed to provincial or local—“sovereign.” To have an impact within this comparatively vast arena, it was clearly necessary for local mobilizations to be aggregated into a larger “pilgrimage” oriented toward negotiations with London. Ordinary political actors inevitably turned for support to allies or brokers who could exploit networks of communication with the king through which their grievances might be satisfied. In retrospect, we may think them naive for trusting that the aristocratic leaders of their broad coalition would represent them effectively, or for imagining that the king might be willing to engage and treat with them so directly. Nevertheless, in choosing to enter the national arena in this dramatic way, they helped immeasurably, though unwittingly, to confirm for succeeding generations the notion that questions of religion and regime were appropriately national questions requiring solutions that applied to the whole kingdom in equal measure.