Chapter IX: Progress Grows Jolly (4)

The Photian schism was abetted in the West by another rebellious son of the church, Lothair, King of Lorraine, who was anxious to get rid of his wife Thietberga. This was one of the most famous cases of the sort during the middle ages, and was prolonged over many years, breeding not only the utmost moral disorder, but threatening also to bring about even political convulsions. Lothair had conceived a criminal passion for one of his wife’s maids, Waldrade, and to marry her his first endeavor was to prove the queen guilty of incest before her marriage with him. For this purpose he summoned his bishops three times at Aix‐la‐Chapelle, in 860, and had Thietberga condemned to the public penance usually inflicted in those days on a fallen woman. The time‐serving prelates, after a superficial examination of the evidence, allowed the divorce on the plea that “it is better to marry than to burn”; thus giving an early historical proof of the old saying about a certain person “quoting Scripture.” Widalon, Bishop of Vienne, who had not concurred in this iniquitous decree, wrote to the pope for guidance. The pope, Nicholas I., firmly standing by the tradition of the church, and vindicating the fundamental dogma of the sanctity of marriage, replied uncompromisingly that the divorce was null and void, the bishops blamable for their servility, and that even were it proved beyond doubt that Thietberga had been guilty of incest or any other sinful intercourse before marriage, yet the marriage itself could never on that account be legally dissolved. The queen herself then appealed to the pope, who appointed two legates to inquire into the matter. Baffled in his first attempt, Lothair now trumped up a second pretext, and pretended that he had been previously married to Waldrade, and that the queen had therefore never been his lawful wife. The pope replied that, until this matter was disposed of, the queen should be sent with all honor to her father, and suitably provided for from the royal treasury. Thietberga was now arraigned before a packed and bribed tribunal, and forced to acknowledge herself an interloper, but found secret means of sending word to the pope that she had acted under compulsion. Nicholas then wrote an indignant letter to the king and bishops, annulled all previous decisions, and commanded a new and _fair_ trial of the case to be held. He then wrote to the Emperor of Germany, Louis II., and the King of France, Charles the Bald, as well as to all the bishops of the four kingdoms, Lorraine, France, Germany, and Provence, whom he ordered to repair to a council at Metz, where his legates would meet them. He charged them to have more regard to the laws of God than the will of men, and to protect the weak and innocent with all the dignity of their influence. Lothair, however, succeeded in corrupting the legates themselves, and the council merely met to confirm the previous infamous decrees and condemnations. Two of the prelates were chosen to report to the pope and bear hypocritical and falsified messages to him, but in vain. Nicholas, secretly advised of this treachery, and no doubt also divinely inspired, detected the imposition, abrogated the decrees of the false council, and canonically deposed the two guilty prelates from all their functions and dignities. They immediately took refuge at Benevento with the Emperor Louis II., who, hotly espousing their cause, marched with his army against Rome, and surprised the clergy and people in the act of singing the litanies and taking part in a penitential procession at S. Peter’s. His soldiers dispersed the people by force of arms, and blockaded the pope in his palace. Nicholas escaped in disguise, and for two days lay concealed in a boat on the Tiber, with neither covering for the night nor scarcely food enough to sustain nature. Thus the conflict between a sovereign’s unbridled passions and the calm and immutable principles of the Gospel was carried so far as to entail actual persecution on the sacred and representative person of the pontiff. The emperor, repenting of his hasty attack, sent his wife to the pope to negotiate a reconciliation. The two insubordinate bishops at the same time sent an embassy to Photius, the sacrilegious successor of S. Ignatius in the See of Constantinople, to demand his support and countenance. “And thus,” says Rohrbacher, to whom we are indebted for these graphic pictures of the early struggles of the church, “did the schism born of the adultery of Lothair in the West join hands with that born of the incest of Bardas in the East.” Lothair and the rebellious bishops now quarrelled among themselves, and one of the deposed prelates, the Archbishop of Cologne, repaired in haste to Rome to reveal the duplicity, the plotting, and insincerity that had characterized the whole of the proceedings.

The king himself, however, showed a disposition to submit, most of the bishops begged the pope’s forgiveness, and the former legate, Rodoaldus, having been excommunicated for his collusion with the king, a new one, Arsenius, Bishop of Orta, was appointed. The conditions he was charged to demand were explicit—either Waldrade must be dismissed, or the excommunication until now delayed in mercy would be pronounced. Unwilling to submit entirely, yet dreading the consequences if he did not, Lothair actually recalled Thietberga to her lawful position, and allowed Waldrade to accompany the legate to Rome, as a public token of her repentance and obedience. But although his royal word was plighted, he soon found his blind appetites too much for his reason and his faith, and, sending messengers to bring back his mistress, relapsed into his former sins. Waldrade herself was now publicly excommunicated.

In the meantime, Pope Nicholas died, and was succeeded by Adrian II., who proved himself no less strenuous an opponent of royal license than his holy predecessor had been. Lothair, naturally inclined to temporize, offered to go to Rome and plead his own cause with the new pontiff. In a preliminary interview held at Monte‐Casino, the pope reiterated his firm intention of coming to no understanding before the king had made his peace with Thietberga and finally dissolved his criminal union with Waldrade. The next day was Sunday, and the king hoped to hear Mass before he left for Rome, but he could find no priest willing to celebrate it for him, and was forced to take his departure in diminished state for Rome, where no public reception awaited him, so that he had to enter the Holy City almost as a pilgrim and a penitent. In those days of princely hospitality and profuse pageantry, such an occurrence was rare, and, therefore, all the more significant of the majestic and practical power of the church.

Lothair, now thoroughly sensible of his sin, and warned by the terrible dissensions of the past of what further misery to his country and people his prolonged obstinacy might involve, signified his intention to submit unconditionally to the pope’s decree. High Mass was then celebrated in his presence and that of all his noble followers by the pope in person, and when at the moment of communion the king approached the altar, Adrian impressively addressed to him the following unexpected adjuration:

“I charge thee, O King of Lorraine, if thou hast any concealed intention of renewing thy shameless intercourse with thy concubine Waldrade, not to dare approach this altar and sacrilegiously receive thy Lord in this tremendous sacrament; but if with true repentance and sincere purpose of amendment thou dost approach, then receive him without fear.”

The king, evidently moved by this solemn address, knelt down and communicated, and his retainers and courtiers took their places at the sacred board. That no pretext might remain for further equivocation, the holy pontiff warned them also, before administering the Blessed Sacrament to them, saying:

“If any among you have wilfully aided and abetted the king, and are ready wilfully to aid and abet him again in his wicked intercourse with Waldrade, let him not presume to receive sacrilegiously the body of the Lord; but you that have not abetted him, or that have sincerely repented of having done so, and are resolved to do so no more, approach and receive without fear.” A few of them shrank back at these awful words, but the greater part, whether in sincerity or in contempt, followed the king’s example and received.

After this, which did not take place till 869, we hear no more of Lothair’s passion for Waldrade.

Germany, too, had her Lothair, and, in the XIth century, King Henry IV., one of the most abandoned sovereigns that ever reigned, brought upon himself not only the papal anathema, but the displeasure of his electors and confederated vassals themselves by his shameless trifling with his marriage vows. His wife Bertha, a beautiful and virtuous woman, the daughter of Otho, Marquis of Italy, never found favor in his sight; and, in concert with some of his simoniacal bishops, Siegfried, the Archbishop of Mayence at their head, Henry held a diet at Worms in 1069 to procure a divorce from her. Siegfried, however, feeling uneasy at the part allotted him, sent to the Pope Alexander II. for advice, and received from him a severe reprimand for having countenanced the dissolute king. The papal legate, an austere and holy man, Peter Damian, arrived during the session of a diet at Frankfort, where the king’s cause was to be finally judged. Despite Henry’s protestations that his divorce would enable him, as he hypocritically said, to marry lawfully a wife that would please him, and to abandon his numerous harem of favorites, whom he would have no excuse any longer to retain, the stern sentence of Rome was passed against him—either excommunication or reconciliation with his wife. He reluctantly submitted, but only in appearance, for he refused even to see Bertha, and soon gave himself up to his former illicit pleasures. His brutal treatment of his second wife, Praxedes of Lorraine, whom he married according to his own choice after the death of Bertha, drew upon him further ecclesiastical censures, and he left a memory justly branded by all historians as more infamous still than that of the notorious Henry VIII. of England.

At the same time that his passions were revolutionizing the German Empire, Philip I. of France was showing an equally deplorable example to his vassals and subjects. He was married to Bertha, daughter of Hugh, Count of Frisia, by whom he already had two children, one of whom, Louis le Gros, succeeded him; but, blinded by a sinful affection, he carried off, in 1092, Bertrade, the wife of Fulk, Count of Anjou, and lived with her in a doubly adulterous union.

Hugh of Flavigny, a contemporary historian, says of this occurrence: “Even if our book were silent, all France would cry out, nay, the whole of the Western church would re‐echo like thunder in horror of this crime. It is truly monstrous that an anointed king, who should have defended even with the sword the indissolubility of marriage, should on the contrary _wallow shamelessly_ for years in _intolerable disorder_.” The Blessed Yves, Bishop of Chartres, immediately lifted his voice against the enormity of the crime; but though his fervent reproaches fell upon a deadened conscience, and his letter to the king was in vain, still among the bishops of France none could be found, at least for a long time, to perform a scandalous “marriage” between the king and his mistress. At last the Archbishop of Rouen allowed himself to be blinded, and consented to unite them, but a prompt and sharp interference on the part of Rome punished him by a deposition from all his ecclesiastical dignities, which lasted for several years. The whole of the controversy had now come clearly to the knowledge of the Pope Urban II.

The Count of Anjou had declared war against the ravisher, and the king had put the B. Yves in irons under the guard of the Viscount of Chartres. In the meanwhile, the pope wrote a scathing letter to the metropolitan of Rheims and the episcopate of France. “You,” he says, “who should have stood as a wall against the inroads of public immorality, you have been silent and allowed this great crime; for not to oppose is to consent. Go now, speak to the king, reproach him, warn him, threaten him, and, if necessary, resort boldly to the last measures.” From 1092 to 1094 the pope never ceased publicly and privately to oppose Philip’s unlawful passion, and, sending as his legate Hugh, Archbishop of Lyons, convoked an assembly at Autun for the 15th of October, 1094, to decide the matter. The king insolently attempted to forestall the papal decision by calling a council for the 10th of September previous, which accordingly took place, and in which a few contumacious bishops confirmed the king in his obstinate resistance to the head of the church. As the queen had died a short time before, Philip presumptuously began to hope that his marriage with Bertrade would now be legalized; but, since she herself was the wedded wife of the Count of Anjou, it will be easy to see how vain were his expectations. The Council of Autun met, and, finding the king determined to continue in sin, solemnly excommunicated him. Philip then wrote a threatening letter to the pope, declaring that, if he did not absolve him from the church’s censures, he would go over to the anti‐pope Guibert, styled Clement III. Philip now attempted to secure immunity for himself in another way: he promised all sorts of reforms, both ecclesiastical and moral, if he could only obtain permission to indulge his guilty passion undisturbed. To this proposal the B. Yves replied, like S. Columbanus to Theodoric, that it was impossible to compound for sin by costly gifts, that God desires ourselves, not our treasures, and that heaven is won by penance and not by gold.

At length, in 1095, the Council of Placentia was held. Philip pleaded for a delay, which was granted him, but at the following council, that of Clermont, he and his concubine were at last rigorously excommunicated. And here Rohrbacher takes occasion to remark, _à propos_ to the crusade which was then occupying Christendom: “Indeed, of what use would a crusade against the Turks have proved if the popes had not, at the same time, resolutely opposed the introduction of Turkish disorders into Christian society?”

In 1096, Philip consented to submit, and went in state to the Council of Nismes to meet the pope, and be absolved from the excommunication, which, as he found, weighed very heavily on his conscience. Throughout the middle ages this one trait, a lively faith, proved, indeed, the only barrier against excesses which, had they been unrestrained by the fear of ecclesiastical censures, would have simply produced a state of license worse than that of the latter days of the Roman Empire. But Philip’s repentance was short‐lived; he recalled Bertrade, and even gave away benefices and church dignities to her favorites, seculars, and persons of questionable morality. Urban II. died, and was succeeded by Paschal II., who again sent his legates to the king, and, at the Council of Poictiers, excommunicated the guilty pair a second time. At this council a strange scene took place. A layman threw a stone at one of the legates, and, though it missed him, it split open the head of another bishop who was standing near. This was the signal for a violent attack on the prelates; the unruly crowd outside the church battered down the doors, and rushed in, throwing stones and missiles of all kinds among the deliberating bishops. Of these a very few, seized with panic, hastily made their escape, but the greater part stood like heroes at their post, and even took off their mitres that their heads might present a better mark to the infuriated and partisan mob. Nor was this the only act of violence perpetrated in the name of Philip and Bertrade. Shortly after this scene, while staying at Sens, they remained a fortnight without hearing Mass, which so incensed Bertrade that she sent her servants to break open the doors of the church, and caused one of her priests, a tool of her own, to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice in her presence. Philip now noisily proclaimed that he was going to Rome to receive absolution, but Yves of Chartres warned the Pope of the king’s insincerity, and the pontiff remained conscientiously cold to all his advances until he had wrested from him a solemn oath not only to cease his criminal intercourse with Bertrade, but also to abstain from seeing her or speaking to her unless in the presence of a third person. Nevertheless, the solemn absolution was not pronounced in his favor before the Council of Beaugency, assembled in 1104, _twelve_ years after his first sin in carrying off the lawful wife of his own vassal and kinsman.

The XIIth century, so stormily begun, was disturbed later on by yet another controversy of the same kind. It has been noticed by Protestant writers, says De Maistre, that it was almost invariably marriage, its indissolubility and the irregularities against its integrity, that have provoked the “scandal” of excommunication. In this admission, made rather to criminate than to honor the church, made indeed to throw the obloquy of schism upon the popes themselves, is there not an unwilling testimony to the Papacy’s unflinching championship of virtue?

In 1140, Louis VII. of France, surnamed _Le Jeune_, refused to sanction the canonical nomination of Peter, Archbishop of Bourges, whom Thibault, Count of Champagne, valiantly defended and upheld. At the same time, Raoul, Count of Vermandois, a man advanced in years, who had long been married to Thibault’s niece, wished to dissolve his marriage in order to contract another with Petronilla, the sister of the Queen of France, Louis’ wife, Eleanor of Antioch. He succeeded in persuading a few bishops to grant him this permission on the plea of relationship between him and his first wife, which, if true, would have made that union illegal from the first. S. Bernard, in a fervid letter to Pope Innocent II., denounces his vile conduct, giving a most lamentable picture of the state of the kingdom of France. “_That which is most sacred in the church_,” he says, “is trodden underfoot.” The pope, through his legate, Cardinal Yves, excommunicated the Count of Vermandois, and laid his whole territory under an interdict. Mass could no longer be said, the sacraments were not administered, the churches were closed, the bells silent. The king revenged himself by declaring war on the Count of Champagne, who had given shelter to the archbishop, and appealed to Rome against the Count of Vermandois. He devastated Thibault’s territory with fire and sword, and behaved, says Rohrbacher, rather like a Vandal chief than a Christian king. In 1142, he arrived before the town of Vitry, sacked it, and set fire to its church and castle. In the former were no less than 1300 persons, men, women, and children, who had sought safety in the sanctuary. He ruthlessly closed all avenues to the church, and burnt the miserable inhabitants as they vainly strove to escape. The town was hereafter called _Vitry le Brûle_. The Count of Champagne, weakened by this terrible onset, sued for peace, and promised to exert his influence to have both excommunication and interdict taken off the person and fiefs of Raoul de Vermandois. It was, in fact, provisionally suspended, but, as the culprit still refused to dissolve his criminal union, he was excommunicated for the second time. S. Bernard was a prominent actor in this controversy, and powerfully worked for the preservation of peace.

But greater troubles were yet in store for France and the church. In 1193, Philip Augustus lost his first wife, Isabella of Hainault, and soon afterwards sent the Bishop of Noyon, Stephen, with great pomp to the King of Denmark, Canute III., to ask the hand of his sister Ingeburga in marriage. The request was joyfully granted, and the queen‐elect brought back to France with all possible honor. The marriage took place at once, and the king confessed himself much pleased with his new consort. The next day he caused her to be solemnly crowned, a ceremony to which great importance was attached in those days; but, strange to say, during the service itself he was seen to turn pale as if with horror, and to cast sudden looks of aversion towards the queen. He, however, retired with her to Meaux, and lived with her a short time, still unable to conquer his dislike, which many did not fail to attribute to witchcraft, for Ingeburga was both comely, virtuous, and accomplished. The king now called together his parliament at Compiègne, his uncle, the Archbishop of Rheims and legate of the Holy See, presiding. The queen, who did not understand French, and whose Danish attendants had all been sent away, was present at the deliberation. Unheard, therefore, and even unchallenged, she was speedily declared too closely related to the king through his former wife Isabella to be united to him in lawful marriage. This seems to have been the favorite pretext for dissolving inconvenient marriages in those times, as it was also later in the too famous case of Henry VIII. of England and Catharine of Aragon, but even in this we see the spirit of subordination to the general authority of the church still underlying the partial revolts of her unruly sons. When Queen Ingeburga was made acquainted by an interpreter with the sentence rendered against her, she was painfully astonished, and, bursting into tears, cried out in her broken French, _Male France! Male France!_ Some pitying hearts there must have been in that assembly of lords spiritual and temporal, some remorseful consciences among that gathering of Frenchmen, who, as Rohrbacher quaintly says, “forgot even to be courteous to a stranger and a woman.” Ingeburga, rising, then added, “Rome! Rome!”—sublime appeal of oppressed innocence to the fountain‐head of justice and honor! Philip had her immured in the Abbey of Cisoing. Pope Celestine III. sent legates to inquire into the rights of the case, but the king succeeded in intimidating them, and no conclusion was arrived at in the council held at Paris. The pope then wrote an energetic letter to the bishops, concluding by a decision to this effect, that, having carefully examined the genealogy upon which turned the question of the alleged close relationship between the king’s first and second wives, he solemnly annuls the unlawful act of divorce passed at the Parliament of Compiègne, and decrees that, if the king should attempt to marry any other woman during Ingeburga’s lifetime, he should be proceeded against as an adulterer.

This speedily came to pass. Not content with repudiating his wife, he attempted, in 1196, to marry another, Agnes of Merania (Tyrol). Ingeburga instantly appealed to the pope, saying that for this outrage her husband “allegeth no cause, but of his will maketh an order, of his obstinacy a law, and of his passion _une fureur_,” as Rohrbacher rather untranslatably puts it.

The Protestant historian Hurter says: “In this instance, the pope stands face to face, not with the king, but with the Christian. Innocent III. (he had succeeded Celestine) would not sacrifice the moral importance of his office even to procure help for the Crusade or to prepare for himself an ally in his dissensions with the German emperors.”

Pope Innocent remonstrated with the king first through the Bishop of Paris, Eudes de Sully, then personally by letter, and threatened him with the last and most awful punishment, excommunication. The king temporized, and would give no satisfactory answer, until in 1198 the papal legate, Peter of Capua, was directed to give him his choice between submission within one month or the imposition of an interdict upon the whole kingdom. This appalling measure had never before been so sweepingly resorted to, and the preparations for it were as solemnly magnificent as if they had portended the funeral of a nation. The council met at Dijon in 1199, and, during its seven days’ session, once more invited the king to attend and avert the doom his sin had well‐nigh brought upon the realm. But Philip remained inflexible, despite the last and urgent letters of the pope, and the interdict was accordingly pronounced.

Four archbishops, eighteen bishops, and a great number of abbots composed the august assembly, and on the seventh day of the council a strange and impressive scene closed the unavailing deliberations. At midnight the great bell of the cathedral tolled out the knell of a parting soul, the prelates repaired in silent and lugubrious procession to the high altar, now divested of all its ornaments, the lights were extinguished and removed, the figure of Christ on the great rood was veiled in penitential guise, the relics of the patron saints were removed into the crypt below, and the consecrated hosts yet unconsumed were destroyed by fire. The legate, clothed in purple, advanced to the foot of the denuded altar, and promulgated the awful sentence that was to deprive a whole Christian kingdom of the consolations of religion. The assembled people answered with a great groan, and, says a historian of the times, it seemed as if the Last Judgment had suddenly come upon men. A respite of twenty days was allowed before the interdict was publicly announced, but after Candlemas Day, 1200, it was not only announced, but rigorously enforced. The effect was terrible; thousands flocked to Normandy and other provinces belonging to the King of England, to receive the sacraments and perform their usual devotions; the king’s own sister, on the occasion of her marriage with the Count of Ponthien, had to remove to Rouen to have the ceremony canonically performed. The king, meanwhile, vented his fury on the bishops, imprisoned some, confiscated the temporalities of others, and caused many to be even personally maltreated. Queen Ingeburga was dragged from her convent, and barbarously imprisoned in the Castle of Etampes, near Paris. Philip’s wrath extended to all classes; the nobles he oppressed, the burghers he taxed beyond their means, until his very servants left him as a God‐ forsaken man. The pressure at last became so terrible that he was heard to exclaim in a transport of rage, “I shall end by becoming a Mussulman! Fortunate Saladin! he at least had no pope over him!” At a meeting of the lords and prelates of the kingdom, at which Agnes of Merania assisted, Philip moodily asked, in the midst of an ominous silence, what he was to do. “Obey the pope,” was the instant and uncompromising reply of the assembly; and, when the king further obtained a confession from his uncle the Archbishop of Rheims that the decree of divorce passed by him had been invalid from the first, he exclaimed in ill‐concealed anger, “You were a fool to give it, then!”

At this juncture, both Agnes and the king sent ambassadors to Rome to ask for a suspension at least of the interdict, but the pope was inflexible, and would hear of no negotiation before an unconditional submission. This Philip reluctantly promised; the interdict had now lasted seven months, and he could no longer withstand the dangerous and threatening attitude of his dissatisfied subjects. In the summer of the year 1200, Cardinal John Colonna, Cardinal Octavian, of Ostia, and several others repaired first to Vezelay, then to Compiègne, where they met the king and received his overtures. On the eve of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, the assembly of lords spiritual and temporal met at the Castle of S. Léger, where the legate insisted on the deliberations being held in public. The anxious people crowded round the doors of the great hall, eager to watch every fluctuation in the proceedings. At last, on the legate’s urgent advice, and in his presence, Philip consented to visit Queen Ingeburga in state. She had been sent for to be present, but had not yet seen her husband. It was their first meeting since their separation six years before. At sight of her, the king recoiled, crying out, “The pope is forcing me to this.”

“Nay, my lord,” replied the injured wife, calmly and meekly, “he seeks but justice.”

Philip soon afterwards swore by proxy to receive the queen as his only and lawful wife, and to render her all the honors due to her rank. As soon as this was done, the bells rang out a joyous peal, and the people knew that peace had been made. The sacred images were again uncovered, the church doors were opened, and Mass was everywhere celebrated with great pomp. The people were frantic with joy, but the king, though he had bent under the weight of influence that had been brought to bear upon him, still persisted in asking for a divorce from his wife on the before‐mentioned plea of relationship. The pope delayed an answer, and, the better to satisfy the reason of the refractory king, appointed another meeting to be held at Soissons, six months after the date of the recent one at S. Léger.

To this meeting Canute III. of Denmark sent bishops and learned doctors to plead his sister’s cause, but, as on the king’s side was arrayed the best—though servile—talent of France, the case seemed not very hopeful, until an unknown and obscure ecclesiastic arose, and, towards the end of the council, which had already lasted a fortnight, modestly asked leave of the august judges to speak in favor of Queen Ingeburga. His address startled and moved all who listened, and they agreed with one voice that this sudden and almost inspired burst of eloquence was surely a sign of the will of God directly urging the queen’s rights. Philip, anticipating the papal decision, determined to surprise the assembly by forestalling it. He accordingly appeared on horseback very early one morning at the gate of the palace of Notre Dame, the queen’s residence, and in public—and shall we not say primitive?—token of reconciliation took Ingeburga away with him, making her sit on a pillion behind him. They rode away quietly and almost unattended, but soon after it became known that he had again imprisoned her in an old castle, and that, having thus broken up the council before a public decision had been rendered, he still considered himself free to seek the divorce. Soon after the difficulty was lessened by the death of the unfortunate Agnes of Merania, whose health had been shattered by the terrible and infamous publicity necessarily brought upon her during her recent pregnancy. It was not, however, for many years after her death, not until 1213, that Philip was sincerely and permanently reconciled to Ingeburga, whom he calls in his will his _dear wife_, and to whom he left a suitable provision as queen‐dowager.

Hurter and Schlegel both give witness to the admirable conduct of the mediæval popes in these and kindred struggles. The former says: “If Christianity was not reduced to a vain formula like the religion of the Hindoos, or relegated to one corner of the globe like a common sect, or sunk altogether in the mire of oriental voluptuousness, it was entirely owing to the vigilance and constant efforts of the popes.” And Schlegel, in his _Concordia_, speaks thus: “We hardly dare to liken the Guelphs, with the popes at their head, to anything approaching _liberalism_, so degraded has the term become in connection with _modern liberals_; yet they alone, because they had religion and the church on their side, were the _true liberals_ of the middle ages. Indeed, if we look at the position of the popes in its highest type, we shall find that they were always either gentle peace‐makers and arbiters in times of unnecessary and foolish wars, or stern champions of the oppressed, and austere censors of morals.”

We pass over a few other less important cases, and come at once to the last and most fatal, those connected with the Protestant Reformation. In the XVIth century, the old story of Bardas and Photius was lamentably repeated in England. Germany was in open revolt; Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, was extorting shameful permissions for polygamy from the married monk Luther; religious were trampling their vows underfoot; Wittenberg, according to the Lutheran chronicler Illyricus, was no better than a den of prostitution; troops of “apostate nuns,” as Luther himself called them, were constantly arriving, begging, says Rohrbacher, for _food, clothing, and husbands_; Luther, their prophet, was hawking his mistress, Catharine Boris, about among his disciples, offering her as a wife first to one, then to the other, till he was at last forced to take her himself, to the no small disgust of his best friends, who remonstrated in the following graphic words: “If any, at least not _this_ one.” The Germanic world was crazy with a new revolution, and henceforth the struggle was no longer to be a partial one, a revolt of the flesh, but a radical onset upon everything divine, upon revelation and faith, as well as upon moral restraints and social decencies. Philip of Hesse, petitioning in 1539 for permission to marry a second wife while the first was living, says that “necessities of body and of conscience obliged him thereto”; that “he sees no remedy save that allowed of old to the chosen people” (polygamy); that “he begs this dispensation in order that he may live more entirely for the glory of God, and lie more ready to do him earthly services; that he is ready to do anything that may be required of him in reason (as an equivalent), whether concerning the property of convents or anything else.” He also hints that he will seek this permission from the emperor, “no matter at what _pecuniary cost_,” if it be denied him by the Wittenberg divines, and alleges as a sufficient reason that it is too costly for him to take his wife to diets of the empire, with all the honors due to her rank, and equally too hard for him to live without female society during such times of gaiety. The permission was granted at last, reluctantly, it must be admitted, for even the first Reformers, lax as they were, were not Mormons. Melancthon drew it up, and eight divines, including Bucer and Luther, signed it, but made secrecy a condition. The shameful “marriage” was performed on the 4th of March, 1540, between the landgrave and Marguerite de Saal, and perhaps the most revolting feature of the proceeding was the consent of Philip’s lawful wife, the Duchess Christina.

In Chambers’ _Book of Days_, a collection of curious information, we read that a still more liberal dispensation from the ordinary rules of morality was in the last century accorded by the Calvinistic clergy of Prussia to the reigning King, Frederick William, successor of Frederick the Great, to have three wives at the same time, the Princess of Hesse, the Countess Euhoff, and Elizabeth of Brunswick. The progenitor of the Prussian dynasty had already given a similar example of licentiousness. In Luther’s time, Albert of Brandenburg, Grand Master of the religious order of chivalry, the Knights of S. Mary, otherwise called the Teutonic Order, broke his vows and took a wife, having already abjured his faith. Prussia, then only a province dependent on the Order, he seized as his own, Protestantizing it, and making moral disorder the rule there rather than the exception.

But we must glance at England, though the story of its defection is so well known that we will not do more than pencil the outlines of the conflict on this occasion. After twenty years of married life, without a scruple to mar his domestic peace, without a breath of scandal to sully the fair fame of the queen, Henry VIII. suddenly strives to obtain a divorce from his wife, Catharine of Aragon, that he may marry one who is already his mistress and the acknowledged head of his court. A faithful son of the church until a personal test of fidelity is demanded from him, he had already refuted Luther’s errors, and gained the title of “Defender of the Faith.” But passion blinds him, and everywhere he seeks a sanction for his unrestrained license. He applies to Rome and to Wittenberg: the latter answers in a deprecatory tone, “Rather than divorce your wife marry _two_ queens”; the former, in the person of Clement VII., urges him to desist from his unlawful courses. Repulsed the first time, the pope sends Cardinal Campeggio, his legate, to treat of the matter with Cardinal Wolsey; they summon the queen to their presence; she refuses point‐blank, and appeals directly to Rome.

In 1531, Cromwell, the astute and traitorous _protégé_ of Wolsey, suggests schism to the king as a means to the desired end. Henry, knowing the corrupt and venal state of the clergy in England, eagerly accepts the proposals, and instantly attempts to enforce a declaration of his supreme headship of the English Church by putting in force, against the clergy, several obsolete statutes of Norman origin, named “præmunire”; the whole ecclesiastical body is threatened with the punishment of attainder due to high treason, and to save the rest they offer the king a ransom of £100,000 (equal at that period to at least four times that sum according to modern computation). The king only accepts this amount with the supplementary condition of the “oath of supremacy.” At one stroke the episcopate is gagged, and schism practically effected. Meanwhile, Cranmer is sent to Rome to apply anew for the divorce.

His mission proved unsuccessful, and on his return a final council was held at Dunstable, Bedfordshire, where, however, the queen refused again to appear, and was therefore condemned as _contumacious_. Shortly after, at Lambeth, her marriage was annulled, and her daughter, the Princess Mary, declared illegitimate. Pope Clement VII. threatened to excommunicate the king; Henry never heeded him. A public consistory, held at Rome in 1534, reversed the Lambeth decision, but the die was already cast, and the complaisant parliament was ready to confirm Henry in all his desires. More’s and Fisher’s were the only dissentient voices heard throughout the kingdom; we know at what cost their courageous protest was raised. A reign of blood was inaugurated; confiscations enriched the royal treasury, and the servile episcopate bent to the shameful yoke like one man. Of the Franciscan friars, Peyto and Elston, who dared to preach to the king’s face against his adulterous union, the Protestant historian Cobbett says: “They were not fanatics, as some have said; they were the defenders of morality and order, and I know of no instance in ancient or modern history of a greater and nobler heroism than this.”(218)

In 1536, Queen Catharine died, and the same year was performed the marriage of Henry with Anne Boleyn by a Catholic chaplain, who was ordered to say Mass early one morning by the king, Henry falsely alleging that he had in his possession the newly arrived permission from Rome. But passion is no foundation whereon to build a permanent and happy domestic life. Anne’s immorality matched Henry’s, and ere long she was accused, vaguely, it is true, of treason, adultery, and incest. Her supposed accomplices and lovers were all executed, and she herself, in cruel derision, condemned on the 15th of May, 1536, to be executed on the 19th, while, on the intermediate 17th, the Archbishop of Canterbury, according to his royal master’s orders, declared her marriage annulled, and her daughter Elizabeth illegitimate. Thus she was first proved to have never been the king’s lawful wife, and then beheaded for _infidelity_ to the man who had never been her husband. Of Henry’s subsequent wives and his methods of disposing of them we need say nothing; the separation from Rome had won him a sad independence of the only tribunal once recognized by kings, and divorce, adultery, and consequent murder had already begun the dark record which has ever since steadily increased in England.

The church was the only bulwark adequate to resist that flood of violent and powerful passions which kingly supremacy naturally incites and fosters, and, in breaking with the church, the licentious sovereigns of the XVIth century acted indeed with the _wisdom_ of the children of this world. Still the church stood fast, sad but not conquered; the Mosaic law stood fast, passing into the dicta of society even where it was exiled from the legal courts—for who does not attach even now some idea of obloquy to a divorced or impure person?—still history pointed to the inevitable punishments that fall on the adulterer, and of which the “churches” so‐called, born of royal adultery, have invariably been palpable monuments.

In our days, who can doubt that that church alone which guarantees the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage can hope to become the saviour and regenerator of modern society; that that church alone which protects and ennobles woman can remain triumphant in lands where woman’s influence is slowly leavening the whole social mass; who can doubt that that church alone which can trace its uncompromising laws back to Mount Sinai can hope to retain the moral mastery over the unruly ages to come, even to that age which shall witness the Last Judgment and the final condemnation?

Fleurange.

By Mrs. Craven, Author Of “A Sister’s Story.”

Translated From The French, With Permission.