The Age of the Reformation Part 46

From the long medieval dream of a universal empire {589} and a universal church, men awoke to find themselves in the presence of new ent.i.ties, created, to be sure, by their own spirits, but all unwittingly. One of these was the national state, whose essence was power and the law of whose life was expansion to the point of meeting equal or superior force. No other factor in history, not even religion, has produced so many wars as has the clash of national egotisms sanctified by the name of patriotism. Within the state the s.h.i.+ft of sovereignty from the privileged orders to the bourgeoisie necessitated the formulation of a new theory. It was the triumph, with the rich, of the monarchy and of the parliaments, that pointed the road of some publicists to a doctrine of the divine right of kings, and others to a distinctly republican conclusions. There were even a few egalitarians who claimed for all cla.s.ses a democratic regime. And, thirdly, the Reformation gave a new turn to the old problem of the relations.h.i.+p of church and state. It was on premises gathered from these three phenomena that the publicists of that age built a dazzling structure of political thought.

[Sidenote: Machiavelli, 1469-1527]

It was chiefly the first of these problems that absorbed the attention of Nicholas Machiavelli, the most brilliant, the most studied and the most abused of political theorists. As between monarchy and a republic he preferred, on the whole, the former, as likely to be the stronger, but he clearly saw that where economic equality prevailed political equality was natural and inevitable. The ma.s.ses, he thought, desired only security of person and property, and would adhere to either form of government that offered them the best chance of these. For republic and monarchy alike Machiavelli was ready to offer maxims of statecraft, those for the former embodied in his _Discourses on Livy_, those for the latter in his _Prince_. In erecting a new science of statecraft, by which a people might {590} arrive at supreme dominion, Machiavelli's great merit is that he looked afresh at the facts and discarded the old, worn formulas of the schoolmen; his great defect is that he set before his mind as a premise an abstract "political man" as far divorced from living, breathing, complex reality as the "economic man"

of Ricardo. Men, he thought, are always the same, governed by calculable motives of self-interest. In general, he thought, men are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly and covetous, to be ruled partly by an appeal to their greed, but chiefly by fear.

[Sidenote: Politics divorced from morality]

Realist as he professed to be, Machiavelli divorced politics from morality. Whereas for Aristotle[1] and Aquinas alike the science of politics is a branch of ethics, for Machiavelli it is an abstract science as totally dissociated from morality as is mathematics or surgery. The prince, according to Machiavelli, should appear to be merciful, faithful, humane, religious and upright, but should be able to act otherwise without the least scruple when it is to his advantage to do so. His heroes are Ferdinand of Aragon, "a prince who always preaches good faith but never practises it," and Caesar Borgia, "who did everything that can be done by a prudent and virtuous man; so that no better precepts can be offered to a new prince than those suggested by the example of his actions." What the Florentine publicist especially admired in Caesar's statecraft were some examples of consummate perfidy and violence which he had the opportunity of observing at first hand. Machiavelli made a sharp distinction between private and public virtue. The former he professed to regard as binding on the individual, as it was necessary to the public good. It is noteworthy that this advocate of all hypocrisy and guile {591} and violence on the part of the government was in his own life gentle, affectionate and true to trust. [Sidenote: Public vs. private life]

Religion Machiavelli regarded as a valuable instrument of tyranny, but he did not hold the view, attributed by Gibbon to Roman publicists, that all religions, though to the philosopher equally false, were to the statesman equally useful. Christianity he detested, not so much as an exploded superst.i.tion, as because he saw in it theoretically the negation of those patriotic, military virtues of ancient Rome, and because practically the papacy had prevented the union of Italy.

Naturally Machiavelli cherished the army as the prime interest of the state. In advocating a national militia with universal training of citizens he antic.i.p.ated the conscript armies of the nineteenth century.

This writer, speaking the latent though unavowed ideals of an evil generation of public men, was rewarded by being openly vilified and secretly studied. He became the manual of statesmen and the bugbear of moralists. While Catharine de' Medici, Thomas Cromwell and Francis Bacon chewed, swallowed and digested his pages, the dramatist had only to put in a sneer or an abusive sarcasm at the expense of the Florentine--and there were very many such allusions to him on the Elizabethan stage--to be sure of a round of applause from the audience.

While Machiavelli found few open defenders, efforts to refute him were numerous. When Reginald Pole said that his works were written by the evil one a chorus of Jesuits sang amen and the church put his writings on the Index. The Huguenots were not less vociferous in opposition.

Among them Innocent Gentillet attacked not only his morals but his talent, saying that his maxims were drawn from an observation of small states only, and that his judgment of the policy suitable to large nations was of the poorest.

{592} It is fair to try _The Prince_ by the author's own standards. He did not purpose, in Bacon's phrase, to describe what men ought to be but what they actually are; he put aside ethical ideas not as false but as irrelevant. But this rejection was fatal even to his own purpose, "for what he put aside . . . were nothing less than the living forces by which societies subsist and governments are strong." [2] Calvin succeeded where the Florentine failed, as Lord Morley points out, because he put the moral ideal first.

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

The most striking contrast to Machiavelli was not forthcoming from the camp of the Reformers, but from that of the northern humanists, Erasmus and More. The _Inst.i.tution of a Christian Prince_, by the Dutch scholar, is at the antipodes of the Italian thesis. Virtue is inculcated as the chief requisite of a prince, who can be considered good only in proportion as he fosters the wealth and the education of his people. He should levy no taxes, if possible, but should live parsimoniously off his own estate. He should never make war, save when absolutely necessary, even against the Infidel, and should negotiate only such treaties as have for their princ.i.p.al object the prevention of armed conflict.

Still more noteworthy than his moral postulates, is Erasmus's preference for the republican form of government. In the _Christian Prince_, dedicated as it was to the emperor, he spoke as if kings might and perhaps ought to be elected, but in his _Adages_ he interpreted the spirit of the ancients in a way most disparaging to monarchy.

Considering how carefully this work was studied by promising youths at the impressionable age, it is not too much to regard it as one of the main sources of the marked republican current of thought throughout the century. Under the heading, "Fools {593} and kings are born such," he wrote: "In all history, ancient and recent, you will scarcely find in the course of several centuries one or two princes, who, by their signal folly, did not bring ruin on humanity." In another place, after a similar remark, he continues:

I know not whether much of this is not to be imputed to ourselves. We trust the rudder of a vessel, where a few sailors and some goods alone are in jeopardy, to none but skilful pilots; but the state, wherein is comprised the safety of so many thousands, we leave to the guidance of any chance hands. A charioteer must learn, reflect upon and practice his art; a prince needs only to be born. Yet government is the most difficult, as it is the most honorable, of sciences. Shall we choose the master of a s.h.i.+p and not choose him who is to have the care of so many cities and so many souls? . . . Do we not see that n.o.ble cities are erected by the people and destroyed by princes? that a state grows rich by the industry of its citizens and is plundered by the rapacity of its princes? that good laws are enacted by elected magistrates and violated by kings? that the people love peace and the princes foment war?

There is far too much to the same purpose to quote, which in all makes a polemic against monarchy not exceeded by the fiercest republicans of the next two generations. It is true that Erasmus wrote all this in 1515, and half took it back after the Peasants' War. "Princes must be endured," he then thought, "lest tyranny give place to anarchy, a still greater evil."

[Sidenote: Reformation]

As one of the princ.i.p.al causes of the Reformation was the strengthening of national self-consciousness, so conversely one of the most marked results of the movement was the exaltation of the state. The Reformation began to realize, though at first haltingly, the separation of church and state, and it endowed the latter with much wealth, with many privileges and with high prerogatives and duties up to that time {594} belonging to the former. It is true that all the innovators would have recoiled from bald Erastianism, which is not found in the theses of Thomas Erastus, [Sidenote: Erastus, 1524-83] but in the free-thinker Thomas Hobbes. [Sidenote: Hobbes, 1588-1679] Whereas the Reformers merely said that the state should be charged with the duty of enforcing orthodoxy and punis.h.i.+ng sinners, Hobbes drew the logical inference that the state was the final authority for determining religious truth. That Hobbes's conclusion was only the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the Reformation doctrine was hidden from the Reformers themselves by their very strong belief in an absolute and ascertainable religious truth.

The tendency of both Luther and Calvin to exalt the state took two divergent forms according to their understanding of what the state was.

Lutheranism became the ally of absolute monarchy, whereas Calvinism had in it a republican element. It is no accident that Germany developed a form of government in which a paternal but bureaucratic care of the people supplied the place of popular liberty, whereas America, on the whole the most Calvinistic of the great states, carried to its logical conclusion the idea of the rule of the majority. The English Reformation was at first Lutheran in this respect, but after 1580 it began to take the strong Calvinistic tendency that led to the Commonwealth.

[Sidenote: Luther]

While Luther cared enormously for social reform, and did valiant service in its cause, he harbored a distrust of the people that grates harshly on modern ears. Especially after the excesses of the Peasants'

War and the extravagance of Munzer, he came to believe that "Herr Omnes" was capable of little good and much evil. "The princes of this world are G.o.ds," he once said, "the common people are Satan, through whom G.o.d sometimes does what at other times he does {595} directly through Satan, _i.e._, makes rebellion as a punishment for the people's sins." And again: "I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a people doing right." Pa.s.sive obedience to the divinely ordained "powers that be" was therefore the sole duty of the subject. "It is in no wise proper for anyone who would be a Christian to set himself up against his government, whether it act justly or unjustly," he wrote in 1530.

That Luther turned to the prince as the representative of the divine majesty in the state is due not only to Scriptural authority but to the fact that there was no material for any other form of government to be found in Germany. He was no sycophant, nor had he any illusions as to the character of hereditary monarchs. In his _Treatise on Civil Authority_, [Sidenote: 1523] dedicated to his own sovereign, Duke John of Saxony, he wrote: "Since the foundation of the world a wise prince has been a rare bird and a just one much rarer. They are generally the biggest fools and worst knaves on earth, wherefore one must always expect the worst of them and not much good, especially in divine matters." They distinctly have not the right, he adds, to decide spiritual things, but only to enforce the decisions of the Christian community.

Feeling the necessity for some bridle in the mouth of the emperor and finding no warrant for the people to curb him, Luther groped for the notion of some legal limitation on the monarch's power. The word "const.i.tution" so familiar to us, was lacking then, but that the idea was present is certain. The German Empire had a const.i.tution, largely unwritten but partly statutory. The limitations on the imperial power were then recognized by an Italian observer, Quirini. [Sidenote: 1507]

When they were brought to Luther's attention he admitted the right of the German states to resist by force {597} imperial acts of injustice contrary to positive laws. Moreover, he always maintained that no subject should obey an order directly contravening the law of G.o.d. In these limitations on the government's power, slight as they were, were contained the germs of the later Calvinistic const.i.tutionalism.

[Sidenote: Reformed Church]

While many of the Reformers--Melanchthon, Bucer, Tyndale--were completely in accord with Luther's earlier doctrine of pa.s.sive obedience, the Swiss, French and Scotch developed a consistent body of const.i.tutional theory destined to guide the peoples into ordered liberty. Doubtless an influence of prime importance in the Reformed as distinct from the Lutheran church, was the form of ecclesiastical government. Congregationalism and Presbyterianism are practical object-lessons in democracy. Many writers have justly pointed out in the case of America the influence of the vestry in the evolution of the town meeting. In other countries the same cause operated in the same way, giving the British and French Protestants ample practice in representative government. [Sidenote: Zwingli] Zwingli a.s.serted that the subject should refuse to act contrary to his faith. From the Middle Ages he took the doctrine of the ident.i.ty of spiritual and civil authority, but he also postulated the sovereignty of the people, as was natural in a free-born Switzer. In fact, his sympathies were republican through and through.

[Sidenote: Calvin]

The clear political thinking of Calvin and his followers was in large part the result of the exigencies of their situation. Confronted with established power they were forced to defend themselves with pen as well as with sword. In France, especially, the ember of their thought was blown into fierce blaze by the winds of persecution. Not only the Huguenots took fire, but all their neighbors, until the kingdom of {597} France seemed on the point of antic.i.p.ating the great Revolution by two centuries.

With the tocsins ringing in his ears, jangling discordantly with the servile doctrines of Paul and Luther, Calvin set to work to forge a theory that should combine liberty with order. Carrying a step further than had his masters the separation of civil and ecclesiastical authority, he yet regarded civil government as the most sacred and honorable of all merely human inst.i.tutions. The form he preferred was an aristocracy, but where monarchy prevailed, Calvin was not prepared to recommend its overthrow, save in extreme cases. Grasping at Luther's idea of const.i.tutional, or contractual, limitations on the royal power, he a.s.serted that the king should be resisted, when he violated his rights, not by private men but by elected magistrates to whom the guardians.h.i.+p of the people's rights should be particularly entrusted. The high respect in which Calvin was held, and the clearness and comprehensiveness of his thought made him ultimately the most influential of the Protestant publicists. By his doctrine the Dutch, English, and American nations were educated to popular sovereignty.

[Sidenote: French republicans]

The seeds of liberty sown by Calvin might well have remained long hidden in the ground, had not the soil of France been irrigated with blood and scorched by the tyranny of the last Valois. Theories of popular rights, which sprang up with the luxuriance of the jungle after the day of St. Bartholomew, were already sprouting some years before it. The Estates General that met at Paris in March, 1561, demanded that the regency be put in the hands of Henry of Navarre and that the members of the house of Lorraine and the Chancellor L'Hopital be removed from all offices as not having been appointed by the Estates.

In August {598} of the same year, thirty-nine representatives of the three Estates of thirteen provinces met, contemporaneously with the religious Colloquy of Poissy, at Pontoise, and there voiced with great boldness the claims of const.i.tutional government. They demanded the right of the Estates to govern during the minority of the king; they claimed that the Estates should be summoned at least biennially; they forbade taxation, alienation of the royal domain or declaration of war without their consent. The further resolution that the persecution of the Huguenots should cease, betrayed the quarter from which the popular party drew its strength.

But if the voices of the brave deputies hardly carried beyond the senate-chamber, a host of pamphlets, following hard upon the great ma.s.sacre, trumpeted the sounds of freedom to the four winds. Theodore Beza [Sidenote: Beza] published anonymously his _Rights of Magistrates_, developing Calvin's theory that the representatives of the people should be empowered to put a bridle on the king. The pact between the people and king is said to be abrogated if the king violates it.

[Sidenote: Hotman, 1573]

At the same time another French Protestant, Francis Hotman, published his _Franco-Gallia_, to show that France had an ancient and inviolable const.i.tution. This unwritten law regulates the succession to the throne; by it the deputies hold their privileges in the Estates General; by it the laws, binding even on the king, are made. The right of the people can be shown, in Hotman's opinion, to extend even to deposing the monarch and electing his successor.

[Sidenote: Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, 1577]

A higher and more general view was taken in the _Rights against Tyrants_ published under the pseudonym of Stephen Junius Brutus the Celt, and written by Philip du Plessis-Mornay. This brief but comprehensive survey, addressed to both Catholics and Protestants, {599} and aimed at Machiavelli as the chief supporter of tyranny, advanced four theses: 1. Subjects are bound to obey G.o.d rather than the king. This is regarded as self-evident. 2. If the king devastates the church and violates G.o.d's law, he may be resisted at least pa.s.sively as far as private men are concerned, but actively by magistrates and cities. The author, who quotes from the Bible and ancient history, evidently has contemporary France in mind. 3. The people may resist a tyrant who is oppressing or ruining the state. Originally, in the author's view, the people either elected the king, or confirmed him, and if they have not exercised this right for a long time it is a legal maxim that no prescription can run against the public claims. Laws derive their sanction from the people, and should be made by them; taxes may only be levied by their representatives, and the king who exacts imposts of his own will is in no wise different from an enemy.

The kings are not even the owners of public property, but only its administrators, are bound by the contract with the governed, and may be rightly punished for violating it. 4. The fourth thesis advanced by Mornay is that foreign aid may justly be called in against a tyrant.

[Sidenote: La Boetie, 1530-63]

Not relying exclusively on their own talents the Huguenots were able to press into the ranks of their army of pamphleteers some notable Catholics. In 1574 they published as a fragment, and in 1577 entire, _The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude_, commonly called the _Contr'un_, by Stephen de la Boetie. This gentleman, dying at the age of thirty-three, had left all his ma.n.u.scripts to his bosom friend Montaigne. The latter says that La Boetie composed the work as a prize declamation at the age of sixteen or eighteen. [Sidenote: 1546-8] But along with many pa.s.sages in the pamphlet, which might have been suggested by Erasmus, are several {600} allusions that seem to point to the character of Henry III--in 1574 king of Poland and in 1577 king of France--and to events just prior to the time of publication. According to an attractive hypothesis, not fully proved, these pa.s.sages were added by Montaigne himself before he gave the work to one of his several Huguenot friends or kinsmen. La Boetie, at any rate, appealed to the pa.s.sions aroused by St. Bartholomew in bidding the people no longer to submit to one man, "the most wretched and effeminate of the nation," who has only two hands, two eyes, and who will fall if unsupported. And yet, he goes on rhetorically, "you sow the fruits of the earth that he may waste them; you furnish your houses for him to pillage them; you rear your daughters to glut his l.u.s.t and your sons to perish in his wars; . . . you exhaust your bodies in labor that he may wallow in vile pleasures."

As Montaigne and La Boetie were Catholics, it is pertinent here to remark that tyranny produced much the same effect on its victims, whatever their religion. The Sorbonne, [Sidenote: The Sorbonne]

consulted by the League, unanimously decided that the people of France were freed from their oath of allegiance to Henry III and could with a good conscience take arms against him. One of the doctors, Boucher, wrote to prove that the church and the people had the right to depose an a.s.sa.s.sin, a perjurer, an impious or heretical prince, or one guilty of sacrilege or witchcraft. A tyrant, he concluded, was a wild beast, whom it was lawful for the state as a whole or even for private individuals, to kill.

So firmly established did the doctrine of the contract between prince and people become that towards the end of the century one finds it taken for granted. The _Memoires_ of the Huguenot soldier, poet and historian Agrippa d'Aubigne are full of republican sentiments, as, for example, "There is a binding obligation {601} between the king and his subjects," and "The power of the prince proceeds from the people."

But it must not be imagined that such doctrines pa.s.sed without challenge. The most important writer on political science after Machiavelli, John Bodin, [Sidenote: Bodin, 1530-96] was on the whole a conservative. In his writings acute and sometimes profound remarks jostle quaint and abject superst.i.tions. He hounded the government and the mob on witches with the vile zeal of the authors of the _Witches'

Hammer_; and he examined all existing religions with the coolness of a philosopher. He urged on the attention of the world that history was determined in general by natural causes, such as climate, but that revolutions were caused partly by the inscrutable will of G.o.d and partly by the more ascertainable influence of planets.

His most famous work, _The Republic_, [Sidenote: 1576] is a criticism of Machiavelli and an attempt to bring politics back into the domain of morality. He defines a state as a company of men united for the purpose of living well and happily; he thinks it arose from natural right and social contract. For the first time Bodin differentiates the state from the government, defining sovereignty (_majestas_) as the attribute of the former. He cla.s.sifies governments in the usual three categories, and refuses to believe in mixed governments. Though England puzzles him, he regards her as an absolute monarchy. This is the form that he decidedly prefers, for he calls the people a many-headed monster and says that the majority of men are incompetent and bad. Preaching pa.s.sive obedience to the king, he finds no check on him, either by tyrannicide or by const.i.tutional magistrates, save only in the judgment of G.o.d.

It is singular that after Bodin had removed all effective checks on the tyrant in this world, he should lay it down as a principle that no king should levy {602} taxes without his subjects' consent. Another contradiction is that whereas he frees the subject from the duty of obedience in case the monarch commands aught against G.o.d's law, he treats religion almost as a matter of policy, advising that, whatever it be, the statesman should not disturb it. Apart from the streak of superst.i.tion in his mind, his inconsistencies are due to the attempt to reconcile opposites--Machiavelli and Calvin. For with all his denunciation of the former's atheism and immorality, he, with his chauvinism, his defence of absolutism, his practical opportunism, is not so far removed from the Florentine as he would have us believe.

[Sidenote: Dutch republicans]

The revolution that failed in France succeeded in the Netherlands, and some contribution to political theory can be found in the const.i.tution drawn up by the States General in 1580, when they recognized Anjou as their prince, and in the doc.u.ment deposing Philip in 1581. Both a.s.sume fully the sovereignty of the people and the omnicompetence of their elected representatives. As Oldenbarnevelt commented, "The cities and n.o.bles together represent the whole state and the whole people." The deposition of Philip is justified by an appeal to the law of nature, and to the example of other tortured states, and by a recital of Philip's breaches of the laws and customs of the land.

[Sidenote: Knox]

Scotland, in the course of her revolution, produced almost as brilliant an array of pamphleteers as had France. John Knox maintained that, "If men, in the fear of G.o.d, oppose themselves to the fury and blind rage of princes, in doing so they do not resist G.o.d, but the devil, who abuses the sword and authority of G.o.d," and again, he asked, "What harm should the commonwealth receive if the corrupt affections of ignorant rulers were moderated and bridled by the {603} wisdom and discretion of G.o.dly subjects?" But the duty, he thought, to curb princes in free kingdoms and realms, does not belong to every private man, but "appertains to the n.o.bility, sworn and born counsellors of the same."

Carrying such doctrines to the logical result, Knox hinted to Mary that Daniel might have resisted Nebuchadnezzar and Paul might have resisted Nero with the sword, had G.o.d given them the power.

Another Scotch Protestant, John Craig, in support of the prosecution of Mary, said that it had been determined and concluded at the University of Bologna [Sidenote: 1554] that "all rulers, be they supreme or inferior, may be and ought to be reformed or deposed by them by whom they were chosen, confirmed and admitted to their office, as often as they break that promise made by oath to their subjects." Knox and Craig both argued for the execution of Mary on the ground that "it was a public speech among all peoples and among all estates, that the queen had no more liberty to commit murder nor adultery than any other private person." Knollys also told Mary that a monarch ought to be deposed for madness or murder.