End of the Reformation

I've had to answer this for a couple people so here it is in our blog.

So how did the Reformation wind up?  Luther died in 1546 as did Henry VIII.  In 1547 Francis I of France died as well.  This left Charles V, the Hapsburg ruler of Austria, Spain, the Lowlands and northern Italy as the one strong man in Europe.  Also he was the Holy Roman Emperor.  Charles decided to utterly destroy the heretic Protestants of Germany.  The time was ripe. A skilled diplomat he called in the small Lutheran princes and told them he had an issue to settle against the rulers of Hesse and Saxony but that he didn’t want them to get paranoid because he intended to let everyone worship as they chose. 

He was lying.  But the tiny princes were cowed.  Charles raised a huge army.  The soldiers knew they were on a crusade and decided to start massacring villages as they saw fit.  Charles conquered Saxony and Hesse the two largest Lutheran states and installed puppet rulers.  Step one was complete.  Step two was to mop up the small states and force all people into Catholicism.  But the atrocities galvanized the Lutherans still left.  And the Pope Paul III, a shrewd politician himself, suddenly began to fear a Holy Roman emperor so strong he could come down to Italy and take over there too.  He told his allied troops to come home. (and maybe he had little stomach for massacres) The same thinking pervaded the Bavarians.  Then the victorious Charles V settled in at Innsbruck and let half his own army go home for R&R.  At that point the Lutherans struck, driving the Austrians over the mountain range. Meanwhile the small Protestants enlisted Henry II of France to take Hapsburg Lorraine.   With the fear of an Emperor ruling everything, France joined in the alliance. On August 2, 1552 the northern allies met with Charles at Chambord where a truce was signed. Amazingly Charles agreed to let all rulers define the faith of their realm until the following year when a Diet was to be called to install new rules.  Or if no rules were to be established, then freedom of faith was to be granted “forever,” a favorite word in treaties and truces. 

Why did he do this?  He could have easily reorganized a powerful army and conquered.  And was not the reason for war to destroy the Protestant movement for good?  For years historians have wondered why the sudden change of heart for Charles.  Then about 50 years ago a stack of personal letters were found written by Charles’s sister in Northern Germany who was married to one of the Protestant princes.  In almost daily letters she shared her faith, wrote of its meaning and never offered a harsh word to her dear brother.  It seems she had become the biggest Lutheran of them all.  What we think now happened was that Charles “wore down” in his agenda and in the end agreed to allow religious suffrage.  And so he never called the Diet.

Meanwhile the Jesuits had organized a counter-Reformation of arguments which they were peddling around Europe and winning some back to the Roman Catholic faith.  Paul III took their initiative to call a church council to reform many of the church practices that had led to the rebellion.  The war of words wore on, but the fires of annihilation grew cold until the Thirty Years War when the two sides segregated into camps around political ends.  In England, the Calvinists led a revolt against the Anglican King but after a year, the old order was restored.  In the aftermath of 100 years of war, feelings were still raw, and many of the people displaced or in fear of it found a chance to have freedom of their faith in a new land, America.  And that was then the first of several reasons why our Constitution was founded on Judeo-Christian ethical principles but not doctrinal discrimination.  The people had had enough of war.