A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume...

It was thus by no predilection or faculty of “race” that the Reformation so-called came to be associated historically with the northern or “Teutonic” nations. They simply succeeded in making permanent, by reason of more propitious political circumstances, a species of ecclesiastical revolution in which other races led the way. As Hussitism failed in Bohemia, Lollardism came to nothing in England in the same age, after a period of great vogue and activity.138 The designs of Parliament on the revenues of the Church at the beginning of the fifteenth century139 had failed by reason of the alliance knit between Church and Crown in the times when the latter needed backing; and at the accession of Henry VIII England was more orthodox than any of the other leading States of Northern Europe.140 Henry was himself passionately orthodox, and was much less of a reformer in his mental attitude than was Wolsey, who had far-reaching schemes for de-Romanizing the Church alike in England and France, and who actually gave the king a handle against him by his plans for turning Church endowments to educational purposes.141 The personal need of the despotic king for a divorce which the pope dared not give him was the first adequate lead to the rejection of the papal authority. On this the plunder of the monasteries followed, as a forced measure of royal finance,142 of precaution against papal influence, and for the creation of a body of new interests vitally hostile to a papal restoration.

The king and the mass of the people were alike Catholics in doctrine; the Protestant nobles who ruled under Edward VI were for the most part mere cynical plunderers, appropriating alike Church goods, lands, and school endowments more shamelessly than even did the potentates of Germany; and on the accession of Queen Mary the nation gladly reverted to Romish usages, though the spoil-holders would not surrender a yard of Church lands.143 Had there been a succession of Catholic sovereigns, Catholicism would certainly have been restored. Protestantism was only slowly built up by the new clerical and heretical propaganda, and by the state of hostility set up between England and the Catholic Powers. It was the episode of the Spanish Armada that, by identifying Catholicism with the cause of the great national enemy, made the people grow definitely anti-Catholic. Even in Shakespeare’s dramas the old state of things is seen not yet vitally changed.

In Scotland, though there the priesthood had fewer friends than almost anywhere else, the act of Reformation was mainly one of pure and simple plunder of Church property by the needy nobility, in conscious imitation of the policy of Henry VIII, at a time when the throne was vacant; and there too Protestant doctrine was only gradually established by the new race of preachers, trained in the school of Calvin. In Ireland, on the other hand, Protestantism became identified with the cause of the oppressor, just as for England Romanism was the cause of the enemy-in-chief. “Race” and “national character,” whatever they may be understood to mean, had nothing whatever to do with the course of events, and doctrinal enlightenment had just as little.144 In the words of a distinguished clerical historian: “No truth is more certain than this, that the real motives of religious action do not work on men in masses; and that the enthusiasm which creates Crusaders, Inquisitors, Hussites, Puritans, is not the result of conviction, but of passion provoked by oppression or resistance, maintained by self-will, or stimulated by the mere desire of victory.”145 To this it need only be added that the desire of gain is also a factor, and that accordingly the anti-papal movement succeeded where the balance of political forces could be turned against the clerical interest, and failed where the latter predominated.