A long update, but it covers a number of developments that set the stage for the next few chapters. The next few should be shorter, thankfully. These things seem to get longer and longer 
. And now, to religion...
As the 16th Century came to a close, the religious situation in Europe began to solidify as both sides of the Reformation secured their positions. The last major convert of the period was the Kingdom of Portugal in 1575. While the Iberian Inquisition managed to keep the home territories of Portugal in line with the Catholic Church, Reformist and Adelerist sympathies steadily spread through the populace, manifesting most notably in the New World colonies where the Inquisition had no presence. Upon King João’s death in 1575, his wife Queen Maria became Regent and announced her Adelerist beliefs, effectively staging a coup of the government. Her actions caused Portugal to be ejected from its ancient Anglo-Iberian alliance with Great Britain and Castille. Suddenly finding her kingdom politically isolated from the rest of Catholic Europe, Maria turned to the one country that might be willing to support her – the United Provinces.
However, it would be a long road of reconciliation between the two nations before a formal alliance could be signed. Portugal had often competed with the Dutch in the trade centers of Europe and the New World, and it was particularly envious of the Dutch monopoly on Asian trade. For decades Portugal had banned Dutch merchants from trading in its overseas colonies, to which the States-General took great offense. It took eight years of negotiations before an agreement was reached – Dutch merchants would be allowed unrestricted access to Portuguese markets, in exchange for Dutch assistance towards a Portuguese presence in India.
Meanwhile, divides began to form within the Justifier community. Since the Peace of Prague gave formal recognition to Justification within the Empire, formal Justifier Churches began to establish themselves and attempt to find a consensus between the various strands of faith that made up the denomination. An early leader of the new Church movement was the Kingdom of Sweden, which had grown from a third-rate country to controller of the Baltic while in the League of Darmstadt. Successive Swedish kings built up a Scandinavian Thomist Church, strictly adhering to the tenets of Thomas Middleton. With strong royal control of doctrine and organization, the Thomist Church became a model for several of the German Justifier communities, namely Hesse, Lunenburg and Brunswick.
The United Provinces took a decidedly different route. Since King Frederik established Justification as the Netherlands’ principle faith, the individual provinces had been given relatively free rein in establishing their own doctrines and liturgies. While technically a united Dutch Evangelical Church under the Archbishop of Utrecht oversaw the commonwealth’s religious administration, each region observed their own rites, some quite different from their neighbors. The southern provinces held their services in Flemish rather than Dutch, while some provinces continued to maintain their monasteries and abbeys as religious communes. A few communities even began incorporating some aspects of Adelerism to their doctrines, which along with the government’s associations with Adelerist Portugal caused other Justifiers in the League to view the United Provinces with suspicion of “heresy.” Playing on such fears, the King of Sweden managed to transfer the title of Defender of the Faith to himself during the League Council in 1596.
Under pressure from the growing Thomist Church, the Netherlands reluctantly took action to centralize the Evangelical Church and develop a uniform doctrine. In 1599 a Book of Common Prayer was issued in Dutch, German and Flemish by the Archbishop for use in the liturgy, while the States-General passed the Test Act, requiring all members of the civil government to prove their allegiance to the state church. A new national seminary was opened in s’ Hertogenbosch to train clergy in the new doctrines. However, the Evangelical Church continued to permit independence amongst its bishops and ministers at a local level, so long as they did not break the central tenets of the Church. The leaders of the Thomist Church decried the Dutch efforts, claiming that Utrecht was straying from the ideals of Middleton. King Johan V of Sweden was happy to capitalize on the situation, steadily shifting control of the League to Sweden. A divide began to form within the League between the Thomists and Evangelicals, with both religious and political repercussions.
The Catholic community was likewise struck by violent divisions. Heated debates raged through the Catholic courts over the proper response to the growing Reformation. While the Council of Nottingham established general guidelines for the Church’s response, as time wore on regional kingdoms and diocese developed different methods for combating heresy in their territories. In Iberia, fresh from the struggles of the Reconquista, a peninsula-wide Inquisition was established under Castilian supervision, which spawned similar institutions in Naples and Poland. Defending its reputation as “the best run Church in Christendom,” Great Britain used its state espionage network to monitor underground Reformist communities, trying heretics in the Court of Star Chamber. With the exception of Portugal, these efforts met with wild success, driving Reformists to flee to safer lands in northern Europe and overseas.
However, not everyone in the Church advocated violence against apostates. Ruled by the Justifier King of Sweden, Bohemia officially tolerated the Thomist Church within its territories, although it was never widely adopted by the Bohemian public. However, the Swedish King did allow for strict crackdowns on rival Justifier movements and Adelerists within the kingdom.
France and Austria were forced to take a conciliatory route, with their positions on the front lines of religious turmoil. The Alpine and Hungarian territories of Austria were hotbeds of the Reformation, and the humiliation of losing the Imperial Crown and signing the Peace of Prague meant that the Hapsburg King was unable to directly confront the heretics in his lands. France was even worse – outside of Bourgogne and the Franche-Comté, the entire nation was split between the Justifier Mayennes and Adelerist Huguenots. Faced with the ever present danger of a three way civil war, the French King needed to tread lightly to bring his country back to the Catholic Church.
French Religious Landscape, 1565-1615
Yellow – Catholic provinces
Dark Green – Adelerist Huguenot strongholds, 1615
Dark Blue – Justifier Mayenne strongholds, 1615
Light Green – Huguenot territories lost since 1565
Light Blue – Mayenne territories lost since 1565
Faced with a strong Reformist opposition, France and Austria adopted a diplomatic approach to conversion. Their cardinals adopted numerous reforms to address Reformist concerns about the Roman Church, and numerous debates were held with Justifiers and Adelerists to strengthen the Church’s arguments. A new church organization dedicated to ministry, the Societas Jesu or “Jesuits,” was established by Ignatius Lupus from the French province of Navarra. The Jesuits, along with traditional friars, took the message of the Catholic faith to the French and Austrian communities, converting thousands back to the Roman Church. Slowly but surely, France and Austria began to make headway against the Reformist tide, winning back province after province.
The Orthodox bloc saw these conciliators as straying dangerously close to heresy themselves. It did not help that the main conciliators – France, Austria and Bohemia – were historical rivals of the Catholic hardliners Great Britain, Castille and Poland. British and Castilian Popes repeatedly ex-communicated the French kings for “offenses against Papal authority,” and placed political pressure on Austria and Bohemia to adopt more orthodox positions.
The matter escalated 1598, when through a fluke of history, Pope Pius III unexpectedly died, and the French Conciliator Cardinal Jules Rouvroy was elected Pope Pius IV. Pope Pius immediately began to implement French reforms on a Church-wide level, using his support among the French and German cardinals. He ordained the Jesuits as an official Church order in 1599, and issued a bull condemning the Inquisition’s practices as un-Christian in 1601.
The hardliners were outraged by the development, seeing it as a French ploy to hand the Church over to the heretics. Great Britain immediately began to plot to remove Pope Pius, working with Castile and Naples in secret. They finally found their opening in 1605, when Pope Pius issued an invitation to Justifier and Adelerist leaders to attend a council in Viterbo to discuss Christian doctrine, as a first tentative step towards a Christian reunion. A secret conclave of cardinals from Great Britain, Castile, Poland and Naples was convened in London, where they found the Pope guilty of heresy and apostasy in abstentia. Issuing a formal Papal Impeachment, they elected the Archbishop of Canterbury as Pope Gregory XV, who immediately declared Pius to be an Anti-Pope.
Coronation of Pope Gregory XV
The specter of a second Schism loomed over the Catholic Church, but the conspirators had already planned for such an eventuality. In June 1606, just days after the election of Pope Gregory, Neapolitan troops entered Rome with orders to arrest Pope Pius. The Swiss Guard put up a fanatical resistance defending the Castel Sant’Angelo, but eventually Pius was forced to surrender to the invaders. While accounts varied, some witnesses claimed the Neapolitan commander struck the Pope after he accused the officer of “driving a blade into the heart of the Church.” Pius was imprisoned in the Vatican, to await formal sentencing and execution.
The Arrest of Pope Pius IV
In response, France and Austria began to mobilize their armies, only to find their enemies already waiting on their borders, prepared to invade if they attempted to dispute the decision. In Rome, the populace rose up against the Neapolitan occupiers, their rage fueled by years of Neapolitan aggression towards its neighboring Italians states. During the confusion Pius managed to escape, fleeing first to Florence before traveling to Milan. However, upon his arrive he found that France and Austria had already acquiesced to the hardliners’ demands, and would not afford him safe harbor.
Without support and on the run, he was forced to find refuge in Bohemia, where the threat of League action alongside France and Austria prevented his pursuers from following. Unable to muster support to challenge Pope Gregory’s claims, he eventually abdicated in exchange for safe conduct back to France. With Rome in turmoil and gripped by increasingly Reformist attitudes, Pope Gregory decided to remain in Canterbury, establishing it as the new Papal See. Never again would the Popes call Rome home, as the Vatican was seized by Justifier mobs and a new Roman Republic was declared.
Canterbury Cathedral, new home of the Pope
Last Gasps of Revolution
The last gasps of the Reformation played out in France, now firmly in the grip of the Inquisition. Pushed back into ever smaller enclaves in Brittany, Normandy and Savoy, the French Reformists saw their days were numbered, and launched one last attempt to take control of the country. In 1612 Denis Duquense, a Breton nobleman with ties to the royal family, rose up with 20 regiments in the Loire valley, in an effort to place a Mayenne on the throne.
Despite early successes, the revolt was eventually defeated in 1615, with Duquense’s army retreating to the fortress-town of Saint Malo on the Channel coast. Despite repeated pleas to the United Provinces for assistance, the States-General were unwilling to risk an all out war with France, and refused to directly intervene. Royalist forces massacred the defenders after a long and bloody siege, crushing the last hope for Reformists in France. The Siege of Saint Malo sparked a mass exodus of Mayenne to the United Provinces, assisted by Dutch refugee convoys from the ports of Brest, Nantes and Marseilles. Over 70,000 Mayenne refugees ended up in the Netherlands, with many continuing onwards to settle in the Franco-Dutch colony of Acadia.
. And now, to religion...Refresher in case you may have forgotten about Justifiers, Adelerists, and other religious developments:
Justification and Adelerism
Mayennes and Huguenots, and religious turmoil
League of Darmstadt
Justification and Adelerism
Mayennes and Huguenots, and religious turmoil
League of Darmstadt
Chapter 28 – Disunity and the Anglican Captivity (1575-1615)
New Alliances
New Alliances
As the 16th Century came to a close, the religious situation in Europe began to solidify as both sides of the Reformation secured their positions. The last major convert of the period was the Kingdom of Portugal in 1575. While the Iberian Inquisition managed to keep the home territories of Portugal in line with the Catholic Church, Reformist and Adelerist sympathies steadily spread through the populace, manifesting most notably in the New World colonies where the Inquisition had no presence. Upon King João’s death in 1575, his wife Queen Maria became Regent and announced her Adelerist beliefs, effectively staging a coup of the government. Her actions caused Portugal to be ejected from its ancient Anglo-Iberian alliance with Great Britain and Castille. Suddenly finding her kingdom politically isolated from the rest of Catholic Europe, Maria turned to the one country that might be willing to support her – the United Provinces.
However, it would be a long road of reconciliation between the two nations before a formal alliance could be signed. Portugal had often competed with the Dutch in the trade centers of Europe and the New World, and it was particularly envious of the Dutch monopoly on Asian trade. For decades Portugal had banned Dutch merchants from trading in its overseas colonies, to which the States-General took great offense. It took eight years of negotiations before an agreement was reached – Dutch merchants would be allowed unrestricted access to Portuguese markets, in exchange for Dutch assistance towards a Portuguese presence in India.
Rival Churches
Meanwhile, divides began to form within the Justifier community. Since the Peace of Prague gave formal recognition to Justification within the Empire, formal Justifier Churches began to establish themselves and attempt to find a consensus between the various strands of faith that made up the denomination. An early leader of the new Church movement was the Kingdom of Sweden, which had grown from a third-rate country to controller of the Baltic while in the League of Darmstadt. Successive Swedish kings built up a Scandinavian Thomist Church, strictly adhering to the tenets of Thomas Middleton. With strong royal control of doctrine and organization, the Thomist Church became a model for several of the German Justifier communities, namely Hesse, Lunenburg and Brunswick.
The United Provinces took a decidedly different route. Since King Frederik established Justification as the Netherlands’ principle faith, the individual provinces had been given relatively free rein in establishing their own doctrines and liturgies. While technically a united Dutch Evangelical Church under the Archbishop of Utrecht oversaw the commonwealth’s religious administration, each region observed their own rites, some quite different from their neighbors. The southern provinces held their services in Flemish rather than Dutch, while some provinces continued to maintain their monasteries and abbeys as religious communes. A few communities even began incorporating some aspects of Adelerism to their doctrines, which along with the government’s associations with Adelerist Portugal caused other Justifiers in the League to view the United Provinces with suspicion of “heresy.” Playing on such fears, the King of Sweden managed to transfer the title of Defender of the Faith to himself during the League Council in 1596.
Under pressure from the growing Thomist Church, the Netherlands reluctantly took action to centralize the Evangelical Church and develop a uniform doctrine. In 1599 a Book of Common Prayer was issued in Dutch, German and Flemish by the Archbishop for use in the liturgy, while the States-General passed the Test Act, requiring all members of the civil government to prove their allegiance to the state church. A new national seminary was opened in s’ Hertogenbosch to train clergy in the new doctrines. However, the Evangelical Church continued to permit independence amongst its bishops and ministers at a local level, so long as they did not break the central tenets of the Church. The leaders of the Thomist Church decried the Dutch efforts, claiming that Utrecht was straying from the ideals of Middleton. King Johan V of Sweden was happy to capitalize on the situation, steadily shifting control of the League to Sweden. A divide began to form within the League between the Thomists and Evangelicals, with both religious and political repercussions.
A Growing Schism
The Catholic community was likewise struck by violent divisions. Heated debates raged through the Catholic courts over the proper response to the growing Reformation. While the Council of Nottingham established general guidelines for the Church’s response, as time wore on regional kingdoms and diocese developed different methods for combating heresy in their territories. In Iberia, fresh from the struggles of the Reconquista, a peninsula-wide Inquisition was established under Castilian supervision, which spawned similar institutions in Naples and Poland. Defending its reputation as “the best run Church in Christendom,” Great Britain used its state espionage network to monitor underground Reformist communities, trying heretics in the Court of Star Chamber. With the exception of Portugal, these efforts met with wild success, driving Reformists to flee to safer lands in northern Europe and overseas.
However, not everyone in the Church advocated violence against apostates. Ruled by the Justifier King of Sweden, Bohemia officially tolerated the Thomist Church within its territories, although it was never widely adopted by the Bohemian public. However, the Swedish King did allow for strict crackdowns on rival Justifier movements and Adelerists within the kingdom.
France and Austria were forced to take a conciliatory route, with their positions on the front lines of religious turmoil. The Alpine and Hungarian territories of Austria were hotbeds of the Reformation, and the humiliation of losing the Imperial Crown and signing the Peace of Prague meant that the Hapsburg King was unable to directly confront the heretics in his lands. France was even worse – outside of Bourgogne and the Franche-Comté, the entire nation was split between the Justifier Mayennes and Adelerist Huguenots. Faced with the ever present danger of a three way civil war, the French King needed to tread lightly to bring his country back to the Catholic Church.
French Religious Landscape, 1565-1615
Yellow – Catholic provinces
Dark Green – Adelerist Huguenot strongholds, 1615
Dark Blue – Justifier Mayenne strongholds, 1615
Light Green – Huguenot territories lost since 1565
Light Blue – Mayenne territories lost since 1565
Faced with a strong Reformist opposition, France and Austria adopted a diplomatic approach to conversion. Their cardinals adopted numerous reforms to address Reformist concerns about the Roman Church, and numerous debates were held with Justifiers and Adelerists to strengthen the Church’s arguments. A new church organization dedicated to ministry, the Societas Jesu or “Jesuits,” was established by Ignatius Lupus from the French province of Navarra. The Jesuits, along with traditional friars, took the message of the Catholic faith to the French and Austrian communities, converting thousands back to the Roman Church. Slowly but surely, France and Austria began to make headway against the Reformist tide, winning back province after province.
The Orthodox bloc saw these conciliators as straying dangerously close to heresy themselves. It did not help that the main conciliators – France, Austria and Bohemia – were historical rivals of the Catholic hardliners Great Britain, Castille and Poland. British and Castilian Popes repeatedly ex-communicated the French kings for “offenses against Papal authority,” and placed political pressure on Austria and Bohemia to adopt more orthodox positions.
The matter escalated 1598, when through a fluke of history, Pope Pius III unexpectedly died, and the French Conciliator Cardinal Jules Rouvroy was elected Pope Pius IV. Pope Pius immediately began to implement French reforms on a Church-wide level, using his support among the French and German cardinals. He ordained the Jesuits as an official Church order in 1599, and issued a bull condemning the Inquisition’s practices as un-Christian in 1601.
The Papal Impeachment
Blue – Supporters of Pope Pius IV
Red – Supporters of Pope Gregory XV
Green – Holy Roman Empire, split between Reformists and neutral Catholics
Blue – Supporters of Pope Pius IV
Red – Supporters of Pope Gregory XV
Green – Holy Roman Empire, split between Reformists and neutral Catholics
The hardliners were outraged by the development, seeing it as a French ploy to hand the Church over to the heretics. Great Britain immediately began to plot to remove Pope Pius, working with Castile and Naples in secret. They finally found their opening in 1605, when Pope Pius issued an invitation to Justifier and Adelerist leaders to attend a council in Viterbo to discuss Christian doctrine, as a first tentative step towards a Christian reunion. A secret conclave of cardinals from Great Britain, Castile, Poland and Naples was convened in London, where they found the Pope guilty of heresy and apostasy in abstentia. Issuing a formal Papal Impeachment, they elected the Archbishop of Canterbury as Pope Gregory XV, who immediately declared Pius to be an Anti-Pope.
Coronation of Pope Gregory XV
The specter of a second Schism loomed over the Catholic Church, but the conspirators had already planned for such an eventuality. In June 1606, just days after the election of Pope Gregory, Neapolitan troops entered Rome with orders to arrest Pope Pius. The Swiss Guard put up a fanatical resistance defending the Castel Sant’Angelo, but eventually Pius was forced to surrender to the invaders. While accounts varied, some witnesses claimed the Neapolitan commander struck the Pope after he accused the officer of “driving a blade into the heart of the Church.” Pius was imprisoned in the Vatican, to await formal sentencing and execution.
The Arrest of Pope Pius IV
In response, France and Austria began to mobilize their armies, only to find their enemies already waiting on their borders, prepared to invade if they attempted to dispute the decision. In Rome, the populace rose up against the Neapolitan occupiers, their rage fueled by years of Neapolitan aggression towards its neighboring Italians states. During the confusion Pius managed to escape, fleeing first to Florence before traveling to Milan. However, upon his arrive he found that France and Austria had already acquiesced to the hardliners’ demands, and would not afford him safe harbor.
Without support and on the run, he was forced to find refuge in Bohemia, where the threat of League action alongside France and Austria prevented his pursuers from following. Unable to muster support to challenge Pope Gregory’s claims, he eventually abdicated in exchange for safe conduct back to France. With Rome in turmoil and gripped by increasingly Reformist attitudes, Pope Gregory decided to remain in Canterbury, establishing it as the new Papal See. Never again would the Popes call Rome home, as the Vatican was seized by Justifier mobs and a new Roman Republic was declared.
Canterbury Cathedral, new home of the Pope
Last Gasps of Revolution
The last gasps of the Reformation played out in France, now firmly in the grip of the Inquisition. Pushed back into ever smaller enclaves in Brittany, Normandy and Savoy, the French Reformists saw their days were numbered, and launched one last attempt to take control of the country. In 1612 Denis Duquense, a Breton nobleman with ties to the royal family, rose up with 20 regiments in the Loire valley, in an effort to place a Mayenne on the throne.
Despite early successes, the revolt was eventually defeated in 1615, with Duquense’s army retreating to the fortress-town of Saint Malo on the Channel coast. Despite repeated pleas to the United Provinces for assistance, the States-General were unwilling to risk an all out war with France, and refused to directly intervene. Royalist forces massacred the defenders after a long and bloody siege, crushing the last hope for Reformists in France. The Siege of Saint Malo sparked a mass exodus of Mayenne to the United Provinces, assisted by Dutch refugee convoys from the ports of Brest, Nantes and Marseilles. Over 70,000 Mayenne refugees ended up in the Netherlands, with many continuing onwards to settle in the Franco-Dutch colony of Acadia.
Next – A House Divided
