• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 482 0

of terror. All deviation from the Catholic faith was rigorously suppressed by its governing commission of six cardinals, with intellectuals marked for close scrutiny. As a consequence, the advocates of reform, who had proposed the only measures which might have healed the split in Christendom, fell under the dark shadow of the hereticators’ suspicion. No Catholic was too powerful to elude their judgment. The progressive minister of Naples, disgusted with the venal Neapolitan church court, began trying indicted ecclesiastics in the city’s civil court. For thus violating the privilegium fori, he was summarily excommunicated. The liberal Giovanni Cardinal Morone was imprisoned on trumped-up charges of unorthodoxy. Another cardinal, who had actually reconverted lapsed Catholics, ran afoul of the Vatican by attempting to prevent war between the Habsburgs and France. He was recalled to Rome, accused of heresy, and ruined. The archbishop of Toledo, because he had openly expressed admiration of Erasmus, was sentenced to seventeen years in a dungeon, and after the death of Clement VII another Erasmian—Pietro Carnesecchi, who had been the pope’s secretary—was cremated in a Roman auto-da-fé.

In the opinion of the Apostolic See, most Catholic rulers, including the Holy Roman emperor, were far too tolerant of heresy. Francis I was particularly disappointing, and the Vatican was delighted when, after his death at Fontainebleau in 1547, he was succeeded by the devout and murderous Henry II, at whose side lay the even more homicidal Diane de Poitiers, royal mistress and enthusiastic Inquisiteuse. Together they planned a grand strategy to crush all French apostates. The printing, sale, or even the possession of Protestant literature was a felony; advocacy of heretical ideas was a capital offense; and informers were encouraged by assigning them, after convictions, one-third of the condemneds’ goods. Trials were conducted by a special commission, whose court came to be known as le chambre ardente, the burning room. In less than three years the commission sentenced sixty Frenchmen to the stake. Anne du Bourg, a university rector and a member of the Paris Parlement, suggested that executions be postponed until the Council of Trent defined Catholic orthodoxy. Henry had him arrested. He meant to see him burn, too, but destiny—the Protestants naturally said it was God —intervened. The king was killed in a tournament in 1559. His queen, his mistress, and the Vicar of Christ mourned him. Du Bourg, of course, did not, though he went to his death anyway as a martyr luthérien.

HENRY II OF France had been admired, applauded, and blessed in St. Peter’s, but in the twelve years following the rise of Luther the sovereign most cherished in Rome was Henry VIII of England. Henry seemed, indeed, the answer to a Holy Father’s prayers. The fact that his handsome features, golden beard, and athletic build also made him the answer to maidenly and unmaidenly prayers appeared to be irrelevant; the Apostolic See was in no position to condemn royal lechery. More important, before the death of his elder brother made him heir to his father’s throne, he had been trained to be a priest.

By the time he mounted the throne, in 1509, he could and did quote Scripture to any purpose, and after the monk of Wittenberg had posted his Ninety-five Theses on the Castle Church door, Henry had denounced him in his Assertio septem sacramentorum contra M. Lutherum, a vigorous defense of the Catholic sacraments, probably ghostwritten by Richard Pace, Bishop John Fisher of Rochester, or, possibly, Erasmus. In it he asked, “What serpent so venomous as he who calls the pope’s authority tyrannous?” and declared that no punishment could be too vile for anyone who “will not obey the Chief Priest and Supreme Judge on earth … Christ’s only vicar, the pope of Rome.”

Luther, replying with his typical grace, referred to his critic as that “lubberly ass,” that “frantic madman … that King of Lies, King Heinz, by God’s disgrace King of England,” and continued: “Since with malice aforethought that