Calvin was the son of a clerical lawyer in northwest France who flourished in Geneva.  He took Luther’s rediscovery of predestination in St. Augustine and extended it.  God predestined everything, even the tiniest of events.  He decided who was saved, and deputized Satan to deal with those who were damned.  But how could anyone tell God’s will, and know if they were part of the Elect, those who would be saved?  In practice, it was determined by membership in a Calvinist congregation.  If you were a member, you were in; if not, you were damned.  In the hands of Calvin this doctrine could be used to excommunicate waverers and opponents, and the excommunicated could be handed over to the civil authorities for execution.

The Reformation was a chaotic time, a spiritual revolution provoked by a rising urban class demanding participation in matters spiritual and temporal and opposed by a Church anxious to maintain its influence and rulers equally determined to maintain their pre-eminence.  But all agreed that peasants need not apply.  The Warsaw Confederation on religious freedom held in 1574 bound the Polish princes and nobility to keep the peace on matters of religion.  However, the peasants had to obey their lords.

The spark that burst into flame in Germany from the combustible mixture of an energetic middle class and the printing press soon spread northwards to Holland and Britain.  In Holland, it became enmeshed in the struggle of the Dutch people to deal with their subjugation by Spain and France, and in Britain it became entangled in the dynastic problems of Henry VIII and his successors.

In Holland, a complex situation obtained.  Most of Holland was part of the Spanish Netherlands, the property of Philip II, and was ruled from Spain.  The eruption of Protestant communities implied a double rebellion against Holy Church and the King of Spain.   When a militant group of Anabaptists stormed the Westphalian town of Münster in 1534 it was ruthlessly put down, and Protestantism went chiefly underground.  People read proscribed Protestant literature, met in unofficial groups but usually observed the forms of the Catholic Church.  Being proscribed, the Protestants could not form an overarching hierarchy, so people gathered in autonomous religious groups and developed their faith within their communities.  Protestantism was still a movement of townspeople.  Rural areas (where literacy would be low) were little influenced by the new ideas.

In England, the Reformation began with the divorce of Henry VIII from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and from the Catholic Church of Rome.  The resulting Church of England was a compromise that included elements of Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism.  The new Church still contained a large component of sacramentalism in the services of the Book of Common Prayer and remained an established church wedded to the state. 

But the continuing tie to the old power structure became intolerable to the educated English middle-class.  Rising in numbers and in power, they wanted participation in church governance rather than subservience.  By the seventeenth century their resistance to the Church of England had developed three major institutional groups: Presbyterians, who desired to stay within the Church of England but wanted to be governed by councils composed of both clergy and laity; Congregationalists, who set up congregations to rule themselves; and Brownists, who pronounced the Established Church contrary to the Bible and separated from it. (Johnson 1979 p17)  Of course, all of these attempts at democracy were experienced as intolerable by the seventeenth century Stuart kings.  The demand for participation in church governance was a head of rebellion that directly challenged the hierarchical concept of rulership on which all monarchy was based.  But when the king proclaimed that clergymen that refused to conform to the Church of England’s Prayer Book should lose their positions, the Puritans felt impelled to attack the system itself, and eventually resorted to civil war. (Johnson 1979 p17)

Their struggle, though ultimately petering out in the Restoration of 1660, left some towering monuments.  First of all was the very hesitance of Puritan-influenced revolution.  Did the Puritans chop off everyone’s head?  No, and they dithered for years over King Charles’ head.  Did they drive their opponents into jail and exile?  No.  They barely went further than unseating about half the House of Commons for a few years, and then relenting and allowing their enemies back into Parliament.  Did they set up a post revolutionary political system so that they and their political heirs could rule forever?  No.  Instead they drafted, under the supervision of Oliver Cromwell, a Petition of Right that proposed a separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government. 

The man who became a regicide and Lord Protector of Britain was a small landowner in East Anglia living about 50 miles north of London.  After some economic reverses in early adulthood he apparently underwent a conversion experience so that, throughout his public career, his writings were drenched in “godliness.”  A member of Parliament, he joined the parliamentary side in the English Civil War in 1642 by raising a company of horse, and rose rapidly to become second-in-command of the parliamentary army in 1646.  The next twelve years till his death in 1658 saw the most extraordinary political events in England’s history.  It saw the execution of the king.  It saw the accession to temporal power of a commoner under a written Instrument of Government, and later the Humble Petition and Advice, two proto-constitutions that represented a first draft of the U.S. Constitution.  Cromwell was a victorious revolutionary who supervised the drafting of a constitution to divide powers between the executive and legislature.  The middle class restraint in the politics of 1650 was profoundly different from the all-out dynastic intrigues of the Wars of the Roses two centuries before.

Up until the eighteenth century, Protestantism was a bourgeois phenomenon.  It was a movement of townsmen that wrested power from the great military families that had dominated the Middle Ages, and indeed all of history in the agricultural age.  The lower orders, peasant and artisans, were not welcome at the table.  The association with peasants doomed the project of John Wyclif, and Luther owed his success to his written support of the landed princes against the peasants.  For Cromwell too, the lower orders were a problem.  More than once in his career, he suppressed leveling tendencies in the parliamentary New Model Army.  Early Protestantism was not for the lower orders.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill