The result was not to dissolve the great division between the realms of the profane and the sacred that had characterised Christendom since the age of Gregory VII, but to entrench it. Rulers inspired by Luther, laying claim to an exclusive authority over their subjects, were able to set about designing a model of the state that no longer ceded any sovereignty to Rome. Meanwhile, in the privacy of their souls, true Christians had lost nothing. In place of canon lawyers, they now had God. Subject though they might be to a newly muscular understanding of the secular, liberty was theirs in a parallel dimension: the one dimension that truly mattered. Only those who opened their hearts to the gift of divine grace, to a direct communion with the Almighty, could feel themselves truly free. No longer was it the religiones – the monks, the friars, the nuns – who had religio. All believers had it – even those who, lacking Latin and speaking only German, might call it ‘religion’.
The world consisted of two kingdoms. One was a sheepfold, in which all who had answered the summons of Christ, the Good Shepherd, were fed and governed in peace; the other belonged to those who had been set to watch over the sheep, to keep them from dogs and robbers with clubs. ‘These two kingdoms must be sharply distinguished, and both be permitted to remain; the one to produce piety, the other to bring about external peace and prevent evil deeds; neither is sufficient in the world without the other.’21 That ambitious rulers should have been quick to sniff out the potential of such a formulation was hardly surprising. The most startling, the most outrageous move of all was made by a king who, far from ranking as an admirer of Luther, had not merely written a best-selling pamphlet against him, but been commended for it by the pope. Henry VIII – who, as king of England, lived in fuming resentment of the much greater prestige enjoyed by the emperor and the king of France – had been mightily pleased to have negotiated the title of Defender of the Faith for himself from Rome. It had not taken long, though, for relations between him and the papacy to take a spectacular turn for the worse. In 1527, depressed by a lack of sons and obsessed by a young noblewoman named Anne Boleyn, Henry convinced himself that God had cursed his marriage. As wilful as he was autocratic, he demanded an annulment. The pope refused. Not only was Henry’s case one to make any respectable canon lawyer snort, but his wife, Catherine of Aragon, was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella – which meant in turn that she was the aunt of Charles V. Anxious though the pope might be to keep the English king on side, his prime concern was not to offend Christendom’s most powerful monarch. Henry, under normal circumstances, would have had little option but to admit defeat. The circumstances, though, were hardly normal. Henry had an alternative recourse to hand. He did not have to accept Luther’s views on grace or scripture to relish the reformer’s hostility to the pope. Opportunistic to the point of megalomania, the king seized his chance. In 1534, papal authority was formally repudiated by act of parliament. Henry was declared ‘the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England’. Anyone who disputed his right to this title was guilty of capital treason.
Simultaneously, in the German city of Münster, another king was pushing the implications of Luther’s teachings to an opposite, but no less radical, extreme. Jan Bockelson – ‘John of Leiden’ – had no palaces, no parliaments. Instead, he was a tailor. For a year, as the forces of the expelled bishop laid siege to the town, attempting to starve it into submission, he governed Münster as a second David, the self-anointed king of the world. Confident that the thousand-year reign of the saints prophesied in Revelation was imminent, preachers in the city summoned the faithful to the slaughter of the unrighteous. ‘God will be with his people; he will give them iron horns and bronze claws against their enemies.’22 A familiar rallying-cry. Müntzer had raised it only a decade earlier at Frankenhausen. Escaping the slaughter of that terrible battle, a handful of men had lived to inspire a new generation. One, a former bookseller named Hans Hut, had taken refuge in Augsburg, where he had preached an uncompromising rejection of traditions lacking the sanction of scripture. A particular object of his ire had been the baptism of infants. Though the custom reached back to the earliest days of the Church, it lacked any mention in the Bible – and so Hut had duly denounced it as ‘a cunning trick on all Christendom’.23 In 1526, on Pentecost, the feast-day that commemorated the descent of the Spirit onto the first apostles, he had received a second baptism: an anabaptismos. Hut’s death in prison the following year had not prevented thousands of Christians from following his example. Bockelson’s reign in Münster was an Anabaptist coup. A host of policies for which scriptural licence could readily be cited, but which the Church had long set its face against, were instituted: the smashing of images; communism; polygamy. Riot alternated with repression. John of Leiden personally beheaded a suspected spy. The scandal and the horror of it reverberated across Christendom. By June 1535, when Münster finally fell, Lutheran princes had joined forces with the bishop, and Anabaptist become a byword for violence and depravity.
‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’ So Luther, appearing before the emperor at Worms, was said to have declared. John of Leiden, equally convinced of his obedience to God’s Word, had suffered for it more terribly. His flesh was tortured with red-hot pincers; his tongue pulled out with pliers; his corpse left to moulder in an iron cage. Other Anabaptists, wherever the news from Münster was reported, from England to Austria, were hunted down. They too died in the certainty of their obedience to God’s Word. They too could do no other. Yet the men who condemned them, Lutheran as well as Catholic, when they imagined themselves preventing a second Münster, might often have their victims badly wrong. Many Anabaptists, when they pondered the writings that had inspired John of Leiden and his followers to exact God’s vengeance on the unrighteous, understood them to mean the precise opposite: never to wield a sword. The verses of scripture were many, and the ways of interpreting them as numerous as those who read them. If some Anabaptists found in the Bible a summons to trample God’s enemies in the winepress of his wrath, then so did many others, pondering the life and the death of their Saviour, absorb a very different lesson. Hut himself, escaping the slaughter at Frankenhausen, had repented his time as a soldier. Other Anabaptists too, committing themselves to an absolute pacifism, had sought, not to overthrow the order of the world, but to withdraw from it. Whether in the loneliness of isolated valleys or in the anonymity of crowded cities, they turned their backs on earthly power. It seemed to them the only proper, the only Christian thing to do.