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When the news of Luther’s death arrived in Wittenberg, Melancthon announced it dramatically to his class: ‘Alas, gone is the horseman and the chariots of Israel.’ They were the words spoken in the Old Testament story by Elisha when Elijah was taken from him. Melancthon was conscious that a great Prophet had gone, and that he had been left perhaps with the burden of the Wittenberg movement on his shoulders. It was Melancthon who spoke in the castle church, along with Bugenhagen, where the funeral service was held there on 22 February. The procession up the long Wittenberg street was led by the coffin, followed by a carriage in which Katie and others were. Following them came the children and relations on foot, and then the University and town authorities. Finally there were thousands of mourners many of whom had come specially and crowded the town. Melancthon turned again to the great names in Christian history, as others did elsewhere, to find some measuring rod. He said God had raised Luther up as he had raised up Isaiah, John the Baptist, Paul, Augustine. He faced up to the matter of Luther’s language and said he would ‘not deny or excuse of praise, but reply as Erasmus often did: "God gave the world in these later times when severe and acute disease and failures prevail, a harsh and severe doctor."’ Dr Martin had indeed written too violently but he, Melancthon, had never known him to be anything but gentle and loving in person. Now, he said they were ‘entirely poor, wretched, forsaken, orphans, who had lost a dear noble man as our father’. The great historic figure and the deeply loved friend were both saluted.

Luther had died just in time. Two months before he died the Council of Trent had finally opened officially. While it would be years before notable results were to flow, it was clear that a serious reforming Council of the(Roman Catholic) Church had opened. Only a few months later the Emperor held a Diet, and suddenly without legal order declared the Electors John Frederick and Philip of Hesse outlawed. He had seen at last that he had the French beaten for the moment, that the Turks were contained, that he could make common cause with the Pope and could now at last use military force to bring the Protestant states to order. Luther’s death had made it easier, but he would have done it anyway. Luther would have seen the end of the world come even nearer.

But no military action could reverse Luther’s achievements, and meanwhile there was the great legacy of memories, of writings, of institutions and ways of carrying on in church and out of it, of music, and song. And, for a time, a special legacy of personal memories. Two months after his death, Katie wrote to her sister:

‘Who would not be sorrowful and mourn for so noble a man as was my dear Lord ? Truly I am so distressed I cannot tell the deep sorrow of my heart to anybody and I hardly know what to think or how to feel. I cannot eat or drink nor can I sleep. If I had a principality and an empire it would never have cost me so much pain to lose them as I have now that our Lord God has taken from me this dear and precious man. God knows that for sorrow and weeping I can neither speak nor dictate this letter.’

Luther had put the life of the great European ‘Myth’ into a new gear. The hordes of pensioned functionaries had gone from the streets and churches. A new sense of authority and responsibility was seen in the local communities. Doctrinally and institutionally, what Luther had put in the place of the papal Church was not, in one sense, so different. Christians were still required to live by a range of received doctrines and morals. And these were still underwritten by the civil authority. But the norm had changed. It was now the Bible, and not a Law Book. In practice both needed interpretation, so in a sense Christians were still back with Church authorities which had to be obeyed. And the Reformers’ Church could be narrower and more legalistic, in the end, than the papal Church; everything had to conform to the style of a single overarching doctrine, instead of being allowed to be deployed over a wide range of options. Puritanism was soon born.

But the changes were qualitative and substantial. The ‘Myth’ began again to look less like a myth and more like the Gospel of the New Testament. Jesus of Nazareth began to look less like a god, and more like the Word of God, suffering for and with his people. The ministers began to look more like disciples with a Christian message and less like purveyors of a marketed ‘grace’. It was possible to understand the Church as a community and a mystery, not just an institution with a set of rules. But polarisation hindered both the old Church and the new. Both turned away from the ‘almost everything’ which in fact they had in common. The new Church was powered by norms which the old Church had protected and conveyed to it. The Bible had appeared, though largely dishonoured, in its best modern edition (the Spanish Polyglot edition) under the auspices of the old Church, from one of its oldest homes in the Mediterranean basin. The Reformed and Roman Catholic Churches tended to become reverse images of each other, both institutionalised. As Rome finally produced its own reforms during the following twenty years, it became more law bound than ever. Luther never loved institutions, and a central factor in his disillusion was the continuing absence of the autonomous Word leading people to a life of faith, love and good works.

Of Luther himself it is impossible to speak summarily. The complex and remarkable story of his life, the tally of his works, and the witness of a great number of friends, acquaintances and enemies are there. Many loved him, many revered him, some were frightened of him, a few resentful. No one accused him, with any semblance of justification, of double dealing, or of cowardice. My principal image is of a man driven, driven by a passion for the Divine, driven, too, by a horror of evil; convinced of its eventual futility, he was ever conscious of its threat, and his life was one of prayer. His friends remembered him standing by the window of his room praying, often aloud. Under the rumbustious lover of life lay sensitivity, intelligence and imagination, and a failure to come to terms with a world which was never good enough, a failure he found confirmed in the crucifix, but glorified in what followed. At the Wartburg he wrote: ‘They threaten us with death. They would do better to threaten us with life’.

‘I am a veteran who has served his time and would prefer to spend his time in the garden, enjoying the geriatric pleasures of watching God’s wonders in the blooming of the trees, flowers and grass, and in the mating of the birds!’ wrote Luther to Justus Jonas on 8 April 1538. The note of weariness and longing for death was becoming more frequent. He was seldom in good health and became impatient for the end: ‘I am more dead than alive. I am overwhelmed with writing letters and books; theological lectures and the stone, and much else weigh me down.’ But there was content, too. Later in the same letter to Link of 20 June 1543, he wrote: ‘I desire a good hour for passing on to God. I am content, I am tired and nothing more is in me. Yet see to it that you pray earnestly for me, that the Lord take my soul in peace. I do not leave our congregations in poor shape; they flourish in pure and sound preaching, and they grow day by day through many excellent and most sincere pastors.

Still alive at the end of the following year in a letter to James Propst, he was back again to a certain despair of the world: ‘Yes, I am sluggish, tired, cold — that is I am an old and useless man. I have finished my race. It remains only that the Lord call me to my fathers, and that my body be handed over to decomposition and the worms. I have lived enough, if one may call it living. Please pray for me that the hour of my passing will be pleasing to God, and a blessing for me. . . It looks as if the whole world, too, has come to its passing.’

But these final years were to last nearly a decade and were again crammed with activity even though undertaken in the face of great weariness and ill-health.

Before midsummer 1537, Luther had recovered sufficiently from the attack of stone to be able to return to work. The University lectures on Genesis were resumed. Then it also Fell to him to start regular preaching in the parish church on a Saturday. Bugenhagen, the parish priest had been asked for by King Christian III of Denmark to assist the reforms there. The Elector agreed that he should go, on condition that his parish duties were properly covered. The Saturday preaching originated in a suggestion of Luther’s in The German Mass (1526), for a preaching service on that day based on St John’s Gospel. So at the beginning of July 1537, Luther started on St John chapter 1, in Wittenberg parish church. Bugenhagen was supposed to be back by the autumn, but it was two years before he returned. From time to time Luther was too ill or too tired, but apart from that he preached every Saturday on this his favourite text. It was the incarnation which held him. He got into his stride and was only on chapter 4 when Bugenhagen returned, even then continuing for a few weeks in order to reach the end of the chapter. It was Christ, ‘the God-den man’, whom he was never tired of propounding. In his opening sermons he took John’s chosen title of ‘Christ, the Word’, and spoke of the tumultuous feelings of man’s heart to provide some analogy of God’s own internal ‘conversation’ in the Trinity. Luther drew again on his early studies of Augustine in developing such ideas:

Luther also published at this time his Three Symbols or Creeds of the Christian Faith to develop the assertion of traditional Christian doctrine in the Schmalkaldic Articles. Luther calls on the early Fathers to expound the Trinity comparing the Father to the sun, the Son to its brilliance and the Holy Spirit to its heat.

By the end of the preaching stint, Luther was drawing on a less speculative seam of traditional teaching, personal and practical, commenting on the incident of the Woman at the Well:

He seemed unable to leave the incarnation alone. At the University on 11 June 1539 he presided over a Disputation on ‘The Word was made Flesh’, the purpose of which was to show the inadequacy of elementary logic in theological matters. Again, he was harping back to his thought of thirty years ago.

The pulpit, the lecture podium, and above all the home continued to be Luther’s theatre of operation. At home he still found time for numerous interests. Music was increasingly a delight and a refuge. He wrote and published a Latin piece in Praise of Music: ‘Music has often stirred me. . . so that I wanted to preach . . .Nothing on earth has greater power to make the sad joyful, the joyful sad, the despondent courageous to incline the arrogant to humility and to lessen envy and hatred’. An ability to sing was an essential qualification for a schoolmaster, otherwise I would not look at him’.

Luther’s favourite composer was that now newly famous late medieval musician Josquin des Pres: ‘A very special master. . .the notes have to do what he wants them to do; the other musicians have to do what the notes want. Josquin was not well known in Germany and it was Luther’s particular musical perception to pick him out. Some thought the new polyphonic style more for the court than the church. But Luther delighted in the new developments. ‘One single voice continues to sing the tenor, while at the same time many other voices play around it, exulting and decorating it in exuberant strains, and as it were leading it forth in a divine roundelay,’ wrote Luther in the Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae Jucundae, 1538. Rhau was at St Thomas’s church, Leipzig, where Bach would be and it was he who had composed the Mass for the opening of Luther’s Leipzig debate with Eck. In the last years of his life Luther tried his own hand at a motet, using for the melody a cantus firmus of the Gregorian plain chant which he loved so much. The Latin words were ‘Non moriar sed vivam’— ‘I shall not die but live and declare the works of the Lord’. It was this text of hope which Senfl had sent back to him, set to music, as a word of encouragement when Luther had written him in melancholy mood from the Coburg asking him to set ‘In peace I will lay me down and sleep’.

Complicated Latin motets were suitable for the well educated. But in the ordinary church services Luther had continued to follow the pattern he set in the twenties, providing German words and music which were simple to sing and hear. A stream of words and musical compositions had continued to flow from him to the printer. He wrote a Christmas carol for his children in 1534. He did a setting of the Our Father in 1539. In general it can be said that Luther, using the rich musical culture that he inherited, set the words of the Bible to music and originated the church chorale.

Music and grammar were bracketed together as the two disciplines in which Luther wished his son to progress further, when sending sixteen-year-old Hans up the river to Torgau (26 August 1542) to the flourishing school there run by a graduate of Wittenberg, one Marcus Crodel. Luther had become by now the traditional German parent, and mirrored his own father’s mixed jocularity and severity. A nephew. Florian von Bora, was sent up along with Johann Luther. Crodel was told ‘be very strict with this one’. Then, two days later, there was an angry letter from Luther demanding a thrashing for Florian for his misdeed in stealing a knife from Johann and then denying it. Luther had had the story from an indignant Paul Luther on his return from accompanying the two older boys.

Two days later there was another emotional letter from Luther to Crodel:

Thirteen-year-old Magdalen died a few days after Johann’s return. Her parents were distraught, although also comforted by the way their daughter had accepted the foreseen death. Luther wrote to Jonas ‘Magdalen had, as you know, a mild and lovely disposition and was loved by all. Praised be the Lord Jesus Christ who has called, elected and made her glorious.’ Still upset a few weeks later, he wrote to Papst: ‘She died having total faith in Christ . . . I loved her so very much.’ He still could not tame his emotions and confessed to ‘a certain threatening murmur

against death’. In between the usual sagas of the family — Katie complained in 1539 that Luther had patched his trousers with a piece out of his son’s — there was still, never far below the surface, the fantasy of leaving it all and departing from Wittenberg. It was to come out fiercely again before the end.

There was plenty on Luther’s desk. He had still to be studying the nature of the Church and the style of authority. His text ‘On the Councils and the Churches’ written in German was published in 1539. He concentrated on the first four centuries, and deprecated the need for and importance of later councils: ‘A council has no power to establish new articles of faith, even though the Holy Spirit is present. Even the apostolic council in Jerusalem introduced nothing new in matters of faith but rather held that which St Peter concludes in Acts 6 . . . the article that one is saved without the laws, solely through the grace of Christ.’ However, he thought there might be a place for a council when something like the Pope’s tyranny had to be abolished. So there might be a need for a council now, even though there was a risk it would just be an occasion for arguing about the order of speaking and for debauchery. A Free Christian Council in Germany might be a good thing ‘if we did our part in it and sincerely sought God’s honour and the salvation of souls’, and so it might have an echo in other countries. But the local Church was what really mattered. They could have little councils, ‘small and young councils, that is parishes and schools, and propagate St Peter’s article in every possible way’. He elaborated at length on what he had been saying for the previous fifteen years: ‘The holy Christian people are recognised by their possession of the holy word of God . . . the holy sacrament of baptism. . . the holy sacrament of the altar . . . by the holy possession of the sacred cross. They must endure every misfortune.’ Its publication showed that Luther was still in full possession of all his intellectual abilities. Other writings gave rise to the query whether the extreme anger and spleen manifested in them indicated a genuine failing of his personality, and whether he was not seriously ill. But the two things seemed to go side by side, both a continuing marked intellectual penetration and an almost desperate fury. Undoubtedly he was in pain much of the time, with head pains, heart trouble, aches in his limbs, and stone. There seems no doubt that his mind remained essentially clear, but that his inborn sensitivity was often having to digest more than it could really cope with, and that the habit of anger led to ever more violent outbursts.

Suspicion continued to be an ingredient of Luther’s relationship with other reformers, though he often tried hard to be fair to them and to be at one with them. The Wittenberg Concord which, at the time and since, had a somewhat ambiguous air about it, was a challenge. On returning to Strassburg in 1536, Capito and Bucer hatched a plan to publish Luther’s collected works, which was also a plan to bring in some much needed cash. But Luther was not enthusiastic. On 9 July 1537 he wrote to Capito: ‘I am quite cool about it . . . For I acknowledge none of them to be really a book of mine, except perhaps On the Bound Will and the Catechism.’ Capito had sent the Luthers a gold ring, and Katie had been delighted but now was furious that it had been stolen. Martin and Katie had been convinced that the ring was ‘a good omen and token of the fact that your church really is one with ours. And so the woman is crushed’. All the same we have total and sincere hope regarding unity’.

More than two years later, Luther had failed to answer a number of letters from Capito and Bucer at Strassburg, and Luther implied to the latter that he simply could not manage to write: ‘So assume that you have been promptly answered each time you write to me. For I hope there is real unity of heart between us . . . Greet reverently Herr Johann Sturm and Jean Calvin, I have read their books with special pleasure.’ The address was to ‘the illustrious man, Herr Martin Bucer, Bishop of the Church at Strassburg, a true servant of the Lord, my dearest brother in Christ’. Nearer home there was less peace.

Karlstadt was no longer a trouble. Professor of the Old Testament in Basel in the thirties and giving Henry Bullinger the same troubles that Luther had suffered in Wittenberg he finally died of the plague in 1541. But an old pupil of Luther’s took his place at Wittenberg of local, least loved ally. Agricola began to preach and write a variation of the teaching about the Law of the Old Testament, virtually rejecting it, instead of giving it the essential place it had in Paul’s and Luther’s dialectic of Law and Grace. The resultant disagreement and quarrel was violent and led to Agricola’s leaving Wittenberg. It brought out the worst in Luther. He could not bear to see God’s revelation being torn apart, but it looked also as if he could not bear being crossed. Other members of the Theology Faculty felt he was being too brutal to Agricola, and a movement arose to elect Agricola Dean of the Faculty. However, it failed, and the field was held by a short piece of Luther’s Against the Antinomians (1539) drawn up by him as a form of retraction by Agricola but containing also Luther’s complaint: ‘Good heavens, I should at least be left in peace by my own people. It is enough to be harassed by the papists. One is tempted to say with Job and Jeremiah, "I wish I had never been born."’ In the end Agricola did finally recant and was reinstated in the good graces of the political and University authorities, though he was no longer in Wittenberg.

Not all the writing in 1539 was negative. Luther had been unable to stop the drive to collect and publish his German works, and eventually wrote an Introduction to a collection published in Wittenberg under the guidance of Kaspar Cruciger and Georg Rorer. In his Introduction he wrote ironically: ‘My consolation is that in time my books will lie forgotten in the dust anyhow’, and the Scripture which he had translated would be read. But he took the opportunity to tell people the correct way to study theology, which was not so far from the advice he had given Spalatin in regard to reading Scripture more than twenty years before. Prayer came first:

Then:

Thirdly, there is the real touchstone, temptation, attack, Anfechtung. These ‘teach you. . . to experience how right, how true, how sweet, how lovely, how mighty, how comforting God’s Word is wisdom beyond all wisdom. . . As soon as God’s Word takes root and grows in you, the devil will hurry you, and will make a real doctor of you and by his attacks will teach you to seek and love God’s Word. I myself (if you will permit me, mere mousedirt, to be mingled with pepper) am deeply indebted to my papists that through the devil’s raging they have beaten, oppressed, and distressed me so much. . . They have made a fairly good theologian of me. Six years later, Spalatin and Rorer got the publication of Luther’s Latin works under way and persuaded Luther to write the Introduction which provided confirmation for and remains an important witness of various events in Luther’s life.

Although stormy rather than peaceful, the heart of Luther’s theology remained something personal, inward and spiritual. Luther was still the man who had responded in his early thirties to the Rhineland mystic Tauler. And there is a real sense in which he can be seen as part of a vast movement which was always starting up again in the Church to seek out the heart of Christianity, what the Germans called its Innerlichkeit, its inwardness. Inevitably, the protagonists of such movements compared the spiritual teaching and ideals which they uncovered with the daily practice of the functionaries. The movement then became one of practical reform, as well as of inner experience. Italy had seen many such movements. During the 1520s and 30s there was a new outcrop. They were mixed movements of priests and lay people often including women, devoted to following a strict rule of life in society. In Rome, Cardinal Cajetan was a member of a group called the Oratory of Divine Love. Many other groups grew up, and new Orders were started, included a new reformed version, the Capuchins, of St Francis’s famous Order of Brothers. The new theology, that of Luther and of others began to be read. A lay theologian, Contarini was convinced that much of Luther’s theology was authentic, having himself had an experience which linked with Luther’s. 1530-40 was the time of the pre-history of what came to be known as the Counter Reformation, a reformation within the papal Church itself. In 1540, the Spaniard Ignatius of Loyola and his companions visited the Pope and official recognition was granted to their Society of Jesus.

Part of this genuine movement of reform was Pope Paul III’s determination to call a Council and to undertake a serious consideration of all the ills in the Church. To this end he set up a commission to report to him. The result was the secret Report Consilium de Emendenda Ecclesia. It was a step forward from all previous reform documents. For the first time reform was not bracketed with extirpation of heresy and the defeat of the Turks, but was unashamedly itself. The authors felt themselves to be greatly daring in setting at the head of their analysis of the troubles a ‘false theory’, that the Pope owns every benefice in the Church and may sell them without doing wrong. A flurry of apology and justification surrounded this daring statement.

Then the text moved on to a formidable list of reformanda: inadequate procedures for selection and training of priests, pastoral responsibilities allotted to those living elsewhere (Campeggio as Bishop of Salisbury would be an example — but Rome was full of such men who used a part of their salary to pay a vicar to look after their diocese while they did other more congenial work in Rome); the bequeathing of benefices in wills especially to the children of priests, pluralism, failure to correct those who make money by hearing confessions. Higher education was to be looked to. The Orders had to be reformed. Occasionally, the voice became uncertain with the realisation that the Roman bureaucracy would need to find an income from somewhere. The text ended with a sequence on the public scandal of the Massing priests, ill-tempered, wearing tattered vestments as they officiated in St Peter’s. Finally, the spectacle, often referred to, of Roman hostesses who ‘walk about like honourable matrons or ride on mules and following them even in high noonday, come the most prominent of cardinals and priests’. There were seven signatories, four of them cardinals, Contarini, Carafa, Sadoleto and the Englishman Reginald Pole. It was a secret report, but within weeks copies were circulating.

Luther received a German translation of it in 1538. It seemed to him only another way of delaying the Council which had been promised so often. There was little about doctrine in it, and it seemed to be a mere tampering with the structures. He wrote to Nicholas Hausmann: ‘Those monstrosities of the Roman cardinals will be published both in Latin and German. But the malice of the matter and the wickedness of those people are beyond indignation and words. . . I am sending the papal coat of arms which I have drawn or caused to be drawn, [a cardinal’s hat over a Judas bag]. The report seemed a mere piece of hypocrisy to Luther, who published it in full with a brief introduction by himself and sharp remarks in the margin. ‘The Pope is trailing his poor council round like a cat with kittens.’ Originally destined for Mantua, then Vicenza, a number of other places had been mentioned for the Council and Trent was beginning to be thought of, up on the Brenner pass between Italian and German speaking lands. ‘If I thought they valued my advice at all I would advise these holy people simply to spare themselves the trouble of a council. After all, the only kind of council which they will tolerate. . . is one in which they can do what they please . . . Well, who then is being reformed? That great scoundrel, Nobody? The text was totally vitiated in Luther’s eyes by lack of attention to ‘God’s Word and correct doctrine. . . Nothing regarding this has to be reformed, or even considered’ were his final words in the margin.

Two months after his letter to Hausmann, Luther’s old enemy Duke George of Albertine Saxony died, and was succeeded by Duke Henry who immediately introduced reforms and Lutheran theology into his domains. It was a gain for the reformers, but the results were not all easily welcomed. The Leipzig printers had to turn over from anti-Lutheran material to the opposite. And they wanted to print Luther’s Bible. Luther wrote angrily to the Elector that he should stop them, as it would take bread out of the mouths of the Wittenbergers — ‘for it can easily be reckoned that the printers in Leipzig can sell a thousand copies more easily because all the markets are in Leipzig, than our printers can sell a hundred copies’.

In the turmoil of politics, Luther, Melancthon and others were drawn towards the end of 1539 into the marital affairs of Philip of Hesse. He had always been sexually promiscuous, but now he conceived a plan to make a high-born mistress into his wife, even though he was already married. The reformers were finally manipulated into giving permission for the old gambit of permitted bigamy actually to be practised on the example of the Patriarchs of the Old Testament. The second marriage was to be kept secret. In March 1540, Philip was secretly married in the presence of Melancthon, Bucer and others to his mistress Margaret von der Saale. The secret was soon out. Duke Henry, uncle of Philip’s first wife, the true Landgravine, was furious. A storm broke loose. Philip received such a volume of abuse that he feared for the safety of himself and his land, and began to woo the Emperor. The political leader of the reforming states was suddenly absent, and intriguing with the Emperor’s representatives. It was a loss which more than balanced out the accession of Albertine Saxony; the loss was one not only of politics but also of credibility. The reformers were widely condemned for hypocrisy or naivete.

It proved too much for Melancthon, who was taken seriously ill on his way to yet another round of negotiations on the future of the reforms that the Elector and the Emperor’s representatives were holding in Hagenau. Luther was summoned to take his place, and wrote to Katie from Weimar, at the Elector’s court, where Melancthon lay seriously ill, an euphoric letter. Doubtless he was glad to be able to see that no agreements were come to with the papists: ‘To my dearly beloved Katie, Mrs Doctor Luther, etc., to the lady at the new pig market: Personal. Grace and peace. Dear Maid Katie, Gracious Lady of Zolsdorf (and whatever other names Your Grace has). I wish humbly to inform Your Grace that I am doing well here. I eat like a Bohemian and drink like a German; thanks be to God for this. Amen.’ Philip Melancthon was already better. Then a sheaf of orders, domestic and pastoral, were fired out ending with a command to Seeberger referred to as Lyacon ‘not to neglect the mulberries by oversleeping . . . also he should tap the wine at the right time. . . Weimar, 2 July 1540, Martin Luther who loves you from his heart.’

Three more letters continued to Katie from Eisenach, in the same vein. Nothing was achieved at Hagenau, and Luther was clearly pleased with his efforts to make sure of that result.

However, Melancthon was soon well again and able to go a few months later to further talks at Worms, and then to a Diet at Ratisbon at which both the Pope and the Emperor seemed to be making one more effort to respond to Melancthon’s eirenic gestures. Cajetan had roughed out a proposal even more liberal than before, agreeing to married clergy, communion under both kinds, no doctrinal recantation and a liberal policy on the sacraments which were no longer to be operated under the same kind of canonical system. The Pope encouraged the optimists. The lay Cardinal Contarini was the leader of the peaceful party, but his fellow Cardinal, the priest Carafa (later to become Pope Paul IV) was determined to oppose him. In a similar way, Melancthon was largely alone among the reformers in looking for a compromise. Eck was there once again for the Catholics. Melancthon finally took a firmer line than expected, influenced perhaps by Jean Calvin who was present. There was agreement about justification, always possible. But when it came to the Church, the eucharist, the nature of the Mass, the invocation of Saints, negotiations broke down. Carafa won the day and persuaded the Pope to set up the Roman Inquisition.

Meanwhile, Luther had written a piece generally thought of as one of his most scurrilous, though it was not noticeably more so than many previous pieces, if equally rumbustious. Against Hans Worst, attacked and ridiculed Duke Henry of Braunschweig, a man of notorious private life, who had enraged Luther by attacking the Elector. ‘Hans Wurst’ was a German carnival clown with a leather sausage hung round his neck. The piece was largely concerned with showing, once again, that the Gospel did not need the papacy, and giving an affirmation of the Reformers’ idea of the Church. Some of Luther’s own personal history was included in the piece. In the opening pages Luther set the pace, speaking of the Duke rubbing ‘his scabby and scurvy head’ against the Elector, saying that the Duke ‘curses, blasphemes, shrieks, struggles, bellows, and spits’, and says that such books as the Duke’s ‘make me tingle with pleasure from head to toe when I see that through me, poor wretched man that I am, God the Lord maddens and exasperates the hellish and worldly princes. . . while I sit under the shade of faith and the Lord’s Prayer, laughing at the devils and their crew as they blubber and struggle in their great fury’. The Psalms, the old Jewish poems and hymns which were and are a staple prayer diet of many Christians often have expressions not much less expressive of common human emotions.

But much worse was to come. In 1545 Luther launched into a full-length tirade On the Jews and their Lies, of about 60,000 words. It was an answer to a Jewish apologetic pamphlet. It displayed Luther in a mood of extreme combativeness, aggression, bitterness and cruelty. He inherited the medieval Christian feeling that the Jews were the villains of the Christian story, as indeed passages in the New Testament make them out to be. Without the benefit of modern psychology he was unable to see how the Jews simply became a scapegoat on to whom were projected every bitter emotion of misery and revenge. If the papists and the left wing reforms had frustrated God’s purposes then the Jews had done so even more. In the twenties, Luther’s enthusiasm for his Christian faith had sometimes led him to think a time for converting Jews could be coming. The failure of this to happen added to his desperate bitterness towards the Jews. In the final section came the scandalous and brutal recommendations that synagogues should be burnt, houses razed, prayer books seized and the Jews reduced to a condition of agragrian servitude. It was almost as if Luther was determined to show, by his own example, how appallingly evil man could be.

In the following year, Luther’s fury was turned once again against his colleagues to the left in his Brief Confession, 1544. At Wittenberg he had continued to have the consecrated bread ‘elevated’, lifted up by the minister for all to see, as in the old papist days, right up till 1542 when he felt the point had been sufficiently made. It had been a gesture against the watered down theology of ‘Jack Absurdity’, Karlstadt. Luther said he preferred not to have the elevation but he did not wish to be thought to be one of those who did not believe in the true presence. Now that they had ceased to use the elevation at Wittenberg he must explain that their theology had not changed. Schwenkfeld was Luther’s current bete noir, and in this piece he is regularly called Stinkfield, Stenkfeld, lumped along with the other ‘loathsome fanatics’. In this piece all the old arguments about the precise definition of the ‘presence’ of Christ in the consecrated bread are gone over, because Luther felt that the agreement in the Wittenberg Concord had been betrayed by the Swiss reformers. While he did not believe in a ‘local’ presence of Christ’s body (the cannibalistic concept) yet Christ is ‘definitely’ and truly present. Here the anti-Catholic abuse reached fresh depths. The Pope ‘has made himself the head of Christendom, yes the anus, as the place of excrement for the devil, through which so great an abomination of Masses, monkery and unchastity has been passed into the world’.

The words were Rabelaisian, yet never verging on the obscenity of Rabelais. And through the barrage of thoroughgoing dungheap language, there was always something being said, some clear content. And commonly it was a reply to someone else’s attack on him. But many fellow reformers did not like the language and were now able to stand up to Luther in a new way. The leader of those who did so was Henry Bullinger in Switzerland, who presented an upright moral and moderate Swiss front to Luther. He objected to Luther’s attacks on the Zurichers and was not going to wait till Luther’s death to reply. ‘He boasts of being the German prophet and apostle who need learn from no one, but from whom all others must learn.’ They agreed that he had shown the way but objected to his arrogance: ‘If someone does not say what he says or if someone wishes to say more than he says then he is banished and condemned as a heretic.’ He thought Luther should not have attacked Duke Henry in such an undignified way as he did in Against Hans Worst. The Confession was answered courteously point by point.

Twenty-five years had gone by since Luther had been denounced and excommunicated by Rome, shortly followed by the Imperial outlawing. He had got used to expecting the failure of both papal and imperial policies in respect of himself. Total disillusion about their commitment either to reform in a general way or to serious examination of the doctrines of the reformers, had become a habit. But some disillusion with the results of the reforms he had achieved himself had also become a habit. Although objectively he could stand back and count up the changes which had been made and which he believed to be good, yet, he would ask himself, had anything really changed? At the heart of things? It was the same disillusion which he experienced on returning from the Wartburg in 1522, when he was horrified to find people not living by the Word. But at that time he was able to take control. After his week of sermons he was in charge. The opportunities opened up before him and his colleagues. And he found a response that enabled him to forget his threat of leaving Wittenberg for good. But now, in 1545, he looked out with increasing sadness on the standard of behaviour in Wittenberg. The shorter skirts behind, and the lower blouses in front seemed to be a signal that people were simply abusing the freedom he had brought them. The brothel was still there. Alcohol was still taken grossly in excess. In spite of all the reforms, God’s word was still ignored.

For him personally there were marvellous compensations. Katie always stood by him. She was a good wife and mother and his close companion for life. Melancthon was always there with his reverence for Luther and his subtle mind. Bugenhagen managed the pastoral scene as it should be. The University was famous, and flourished. And so the count could continue. But Luther’s depression would strike again as he turned to the deviations, the failures, his own and others. It was a world which still hardly seemed to recognise the message of the Word, still seemed to live in the world of Law. The Jews, the papacy, other reformers, obstinate old worldly Wittenbergers, they were all ripe targets for his anger compounded now with the frustration of illlness and old age. At the beginning of the year, fresh news came from Rome.

On 26 January 1545. Luther wrote to Jonas: ‘A letter of the Pope is circulating which the brethren have sent to Veit Dietrich from Venice . . . written in an absolutely arrogant and violent tone. . . to the Emperor. . . the Pope with much and great and openly Italian arrogance demands. . . why the Emperor dares to permit and promise colloquies about religion since it is not the Emperor’s place to teach but rather to listen.’ Luther wondered whether the Emperor really would start behaving like an Emperor in the days of the fourth century and call a Council: ‘What a lively reformation that will be! If it is true, then the Pope’s goose is really cooked.’ But Luther thought the idea was just a trap to coax the Protestant rulers to a political agreement.

At the Diet of Speyer in 1544 the Emperor had needed once again to gain the political support of the Protestants, or at least to assure their neutrality during his war against both Francis I of France and the Turks. On 10 June, a Recess was agreed which took the big step of agreeing to the legal rights of Protestant holders of benefices and revenues now in their hands. The Emperor was growing increasingly sceptical about whether the Pope would ever call a Council, due to duplicity or inefficiency or sheer lack of will. So the Recess spoke of a further German Diet at which a ‘Christian reformation by devout and peace loving men’ would be discussed. The Roman reaction was emphatic. The Emperor was severely put in his place in the papal text. His initiative had had a strongly stimulating effect on the Pope and Curia which made further efforts to bring a Council into being. It was now firmly called for 25 March 1545 at Trent.

Luther felt he must reply to the Roman reprimand of the Emperor, and produced the most virulent of all his anti-papal texts, Against the Roman Papacy, an Institution of the Devil. It was published on Lady Day, the date the Council was due to open. Again it was primarily a statement of the authenticity of the Church as understood by the Reformers, and the invalidity, indeed positively anti-christian nature, of the papal church. But its invective is what remained in the minds of most people. On its cover was a wood cut by Cranach showing the Pope in the jaws of hell. It opened: ‘The Most Hellish Father, St Paul III, in his supposed capacity as the bishop of the Roman church, has written two briefs to Charles V, our Lord Emperor, wherein he appears furious, growling and boasting, according to the example of his predecessors that neither an Emperor nor anyone else has the right to convoke a council, even a national one except solely a pope.

In May 1545, the political merry-go-round produced a sudden reversal of priorities. The Emperor’s military fortunes rallied, and he began seriously to think about military action against the Schmalkaldic League. He began to retreat from the idea of a christian Council called by himself and to think seriously about the Pope as an ally rather than a competitor. Pope and Emperor, with faltering steps, and ever alert mutual suspicion, moved together towards enabling a traditional Council of the church to open at Trent.

When news reached Luther ‘that the Council was still being expected to open in Trent, he could only dismiss it with increasing irritation and anger, beginning to glimpse that the Catholic forces, theological, political and military were in fact beginning to come together. To the Elector he wrote on 7 May: ‘The news about the council at Trent and those who supposedly are present there, I consider to be gossip and nonsense spread the men of Rome and Mainz . . . God does not want them and they do not want him either.’ After so many false starts, and considering the great scepticism still abroad even in Trent itself about the possibility of a council actually starting, Luther’s attitude was well justified. But he was beginning to sense that he was wrong.

On 3 June he wrote to Amsdorf: ‘I do not care about diets and councils, I do not believe in anything about them, I do not expect anything from them, I do not worry about them. Vanity of vanities.’ On 9 July in a letter to Amsdorf, he was able to draw comfort from a contradiction between the Pope and the Emperor but it was a contradiction which, however it was resolved, threatened the reforms: The Pope shouts that we are heretics and that we must not have a place in the council; the Emperor wants us to consent to the council and its decrees. Perhaps God is making fools out of them; indeed Satan reigns, all of them are so totally mad that they condemn us and at the same time ask for our consent.’ In fact, no ‘consent’ was now being asked for, but rather the assent of subjects. Luther was beginning to take the matter of the council at Trent seriously, and felt he must make his own position about the relation between Pope and Council clear: ‘Let the Pope first acknowledge that the council is superior to him and let him listen to the council . . . Farewell in the Lord, my Reverend Father! Both of us are old; perhaps in a short while we will have to be buried. My torturer, the stone, would have killed me on St Johns day [The Nativity of St John the Baptist, 24 June] had God not decided differently. I prefer death to such a tyrant.’

On 16 July in a letter to Jonas, Luther retailed further evidence of the progress of the Council of Trent, and of its futility: ‘The man of Mainz [Cardinal Albrecht] has sent some ridiculous delegates to the council but that monster laughs at the same time about us and the Pope. The council is really Tridentum [the Latin for Trent], that is, in German, torn apart, split up, and dissolved. . . I absolutely believe they do not know what they are doing.’ On 17 July the anxiety about the Council is mounting, as he writes to Amsdorf: ‘From Trent comes news that twenty-three bishops and three cardinals are present. . .May they have a bad time, as the wrath of God moves them.’

Later in the month, on a journey to help settle a controversy at Zeit, near Naumburg, and to ordain a bishop in Merseburg, all the burdens suddenly became more than Luther could tolerate, and the simple decision not to return to Wittenberg took hold of him. A scandalous story of seduction in Wittenberg was the trigger. He sent blunt and practical instructions home to Katie in a letter (28 July), written in his normal matter-of-fact vein as though nothing very special was really being said. Katie must have known very well the anguish and misery that lay behind the words, understood how her husband was making the greatest gesture he could of protest against a life which had become finally too burdensome: ‘To my kind and dear mistress of the house, Luther’s Katherine von Rora, a preacher, a brewer, a gardener, and whatever also she is capable of doing. Grace and peace! Dear Katie, Johann will tell you everything . . .’ The oldest son had accompanied Luther. ‘I would like to arrange matters in such a way that I do not have to return to Wittenberg. My heart has become cold, so that I do not like to be there any longer. I wish you would sell the garden and field, house and all. Also I would like to return the big house [the old Friary] to my Most Gracious Lord. It would be best for you to move to Zolsdorf as long as I am still living and able to help you to improve the little property with my salary.’ He says she will never be able to stay in Wittenberg after his death, they will hound her out one way or another. ‘They have started to bare women and maidens in front and back, and there is no one who punishes or objects . .’ And then a reference to the scandal: ‘While in the country I have heard more than I find out while in Wittenberg. Consequently I am tired of this city. . . I shall keep on the move and would rather eat the bread of a beggar than torture and upset my old age and final days with the filth at Wittenberg which destroys my hard and faithful work. You might inform Dr Pomer and Master Philip of this (if you wish) and if Doctor Pomer would wish to say goodbye to Wittenberg on my behalf. For I am unable any longer to endure my anger and dislike.’

It was the dangerous acting out of fantasy. Two days previously, Luther had preached at Leipzig and had been the guest of honour at the house of one of its wealthiest citizens, Heintz Scherle. The letter was a great sigh of the spirit, ‘My heart has grown cold’, a protest and a shout of pain. It put Melancthon into a great state. He worried that arguments which had been going on between Luther and the Law Faculty, and with himself, were the real cause. He had been pegging out once again his understanding of the eucharist, with some sympathy with Swiss ideas, and using words noticeably different from those Luther used. He feared greatly that these things were the real cause of the trouble. Doubtless they had contributed to the psychological pressure which had finally triggered the only action tolerable to Luther, to rid himself of the whole terrible burden of his daily life. But they were not at the heart of the pressure, which was not essentially different from what it had always been. Only now it became intolerable to the weary, prematurely aged revolutionary.

The practical men saw what to do. The Elector and High Chancellor Bruck, along with Ratzeberger, Luther’s medical doctor, took the matter in hand. Luther was told it could be quite complicated getting the property on to the market. Measures for the reform of morals in Wittenberg were promised, doubtless in good faith. Kind, practical men provided medical attention, hospitality and genuine sympathy, and Luther was talked round. The miseries did not go away but he came back to Wittenberg and life went on as before. And somehow, in the eyes of his friends and his family, he was not diminished. They were glad to do him a service, to see him needing help, and glad to be able to give it. He came back and resumed his lectures on the final pages of Genesis, lectures which he had begun ten years before.

Luther’s family, including a wide range of distant relatives, were always part of his life. His childhood home was only forty miles away, and it was there to Mansfeld that he was asked to go in October along with Melancthon and Jonas, to help untangle an argument about property and privileges and jurisdiction among the ruling family. But nothing was achieved. They had to depart. Back in Wittenberg, Luther reached the last verse of Genesis with its symbolical ending, and its atmosphere of promise and faith which were so much part of Luther’s faith: ‘At length Joseph said to his brothers, I am about to die; but God will be sure to remember you kindly and take you back from this country to the land that he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And Joseph made Israel’s sons swear an oath, "When God remembers you with kindness be sure to take my bones from here." Joseph died at the age of a hundred and ten; they embalmed him and laid him in his coffin in Egypt.’ Luther closed his book and said: ‘May our Lord God grant to somebody else to make a better job of it. I can no more, I am too weak — pray to God for me that he will give me a good, blessed end’ — a Stundlein, a little hour, a word he often used for his last hour. He was ever more and more waiting and hoping for it.

In January, Luther set out once again to solve the quarrels of the Counts of Mansfeld, with his sons in attendance. At Halle on his way to Eisleben, he was held up by floods which he personified in a letter to Katie of 25 January as a ‘huge she-Anabaptist’ which ‘met us with waves of water and great floating pieces of ice; she threatened to baptise us again and has covered the countryside.’ They had left Halle but had to turn back. ‘I am sure that, if you were here, you too would have advised us to proceed in this way; you see, at least once we are following your advice.’

On February, Luther wrote again to Katie now in the thick of the attempts to solve the family quarrel. It was addressed in the usual way to the lady of Zolsdorf and the pig market, discussed the possibility that a local community of Jews were responsible for the blast of cold wind which had attacked him as he travelled, recorded the excellent local and laxative beer (three bowel movements in three hours), and told Katie, ‘The day before yesterday your little sons drove to Mansfeld’. John, Martin and Paul took the opportunity to visit uncles and aunts and cousins. To Melancthon he revealed in a letter of the same date that he was not well, suffering from heart trouble, that he was upset by the arguments he was having to umpire and wanted to be shot of the whole thing as soon as possible. It was all ‘totally incompatible with my disposition, and quite bothersome to my old age’.

Two days later he wrote again to Melancthon that he was ‘playing the role of a sick goat’, unable to solve the difficulties, said that the chimney in his room had caught fire, and ended, ‘Pray for me that the Lord may bring me back before I am killed by these battles of the wills.’

On 6 February, he wrote again both to his wife and Melancthon, asking the latter to get the Elector to send him a letter ordering him home, in an attempt to shock the Counts and the rest of the family into agreement. He was finding the lawyers as tiresome as ever: ‘You may say this is a word-war or a word-insanity, a pleasure one owes to jurists. . . so many ambiguities, sophistries and chicaneries . . . their jargon is more confusing than all the tongues of Babylon.’ To Katie he reported that he still could not get away and that the children were still at Mansfeld.

On 7 February, a letter to Katie told her to stop worrying: ‘You prefer to worry about me instead of letting God worry, as if he were not almighty. . . Free me from your worries. I have a caretaker who is better than you and all the angels; he lies in the cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom, and yet, nevertheless, he sits at the right hand of God, the almighty Father.’ But the quarrel went on, and he told Katie and the rest of them to ‘pray, pray, pray’ so that it could be finished. Meanwhile, however, ‘we are living well: for each meal the city council gives me one half Stubig of Italian wine.’ Three days later, he is again saying he is healthy and she must stop worrying and the quarrel is still tiresome. Then at last, on 14 February, he was able to write that the quarrel had been resolved. ‘We hope to return home again this week . . . The young lords are happy and ride around together in sleighs decorated with fools’ bells as do the young ladies. . . I am sending you the trout.’ The children remained at Mansfeld. There were rumours again of political troubles, of mercenaries being hired.

Luther had to stay on another two days to get documents signed and the whole matter sealed. But the effort of it all had proved too much for him. He had a heart attack and became seriously ill on 17 February. He sank rapidly. Friends gathered. He reaffirmed his faith. In the early morning of 18 February he died, in pain but mentally alert. He was always writing and no one can be sure what were the last words he wrote. But among the last was a note on his desk, which ended ‘The truth is, we are beggars.’ A funeral service was held in Eisleben and an attempt was made by the Counts of Mansfeld to have him buried there. But the Elector insisted that the body be brought back to Wittenberg.

The Saxon Elector lost no time. By February 1531, he was ready at Schmalkalden in western Saxony to sign a document of wide-ranging alliance. It set up a League with the Landgrave of Hesse, the Dukes of Brunswick and Luneberg, the prince of Anhalt, the Counts of Mansfeld, and the representatives of eleven ‘cities of Upper Germany, Saxony and the Sea’, Strassburg, Ulm, Constance, Reutlingen, Memmingen, Lindau, Bibrach, Isny, Lubeck, Magdeburg and Bremen. This Schmalkaldic league was an alliance for their mutual defence if attacked on account of the Word of God and the doctrine of the Gospel. Nuremberg was not in the alliance. Rich, commercial, cultured, the home of Albert Durer and Hans Sachs, both of them ‘Lutherans’, Nuremberg had been one of the first cities to implement Church reforms. But it liked to keep its independence at all times, whether in pioneering liturgical reforms in the 1520s, or in declining now to join in a possibly dangerous alliance against the Emperor. The Town Council’s Chancellor, Lazarus Spengler, sent a message to Wittenberg enquiring whether Luther (an old acquaintance) had changed his mind on the matter of resistance to a possible attack from imperial forces. Put on the spot, Luther replied that he had not changed his mind about the correct way to approach such a matter, but that the lawyers had changed theirs about the legal facts! He was much more guarded than in his ‘Warning to his Dear German People’. But the practical outcome did not escape the Nuremberg Council. It was a turnabout.

The Schmalkaldic League was founded on 27 February 1531. For fourteen months thereafter, its members worked at building up a network of organisational procedures; these were confirmed at Schweinfurt in April 1532. The deadline for compliance with the Augsburg Diet was now a year past. No action had come from the Emperor, who was taken up with renewed threats from the Turks in Eastern Europe. Something like the political birth of modern Germany was in process. The Emperor requested the pro-imperial and pro-papal Electors to come to an arrangement with the Schmalkaldic League. The latter was growing. The recent death of Zwingli in a local Swiss canton battle of Protestant versus Catholic had reduced the level of worry about maintaining some kind of credible doctrinal unity. The League was willing to negotiate with the Emperor, who had one demand — he wished to retain the Imperial office for the Habsburg family. A formal agreement with the League would depend on acceptance of his brother Ferdinand, as Emperor elect. The Saxon Elector, not surprisingly, was bitterly opposed and consulted Luther, who advised that the condition was not intolerable, It would be best to negotiate:

‘I am of the opinion that the negotiations proposed by the Cardinal of Mainz should not be rejected — "Gain a night, gain a year,"’ Luther wrote to Altkanzeler Bruck on 16 June 1531, when negotiations had already begun. By the following summer, Nuremberg itself was involved in the setting up of an entirely new kind of ‘Peace’ between the Emperor and those political entities which favoured the Reforms but were part of the Empire. Again Luther backed it and disapproved of delays: ‘If we want cleverly to arrange matters exactly as we wish them to be. . .it will be for us as Solomon says: "He who blows his nose too hard forces blood from it."’ The Peace of Nuremberg was signed on 23 July 1532 between the Emperor, nine princes and twenty-four cities, which now included Hamburg. Essentially, it was a temporary abrogation of some of the imperial powers. The Emperor had again to forgo the solution of the religious issue which was thrown forward to a ‘Council’ — and the council was again foreseen not as a normal Church Council but a ‘free’, and ‘Christian’ Council in Germany. Local religious independence and political independence on a national basis, were again being actively intertwined and this progress, laced with the duplicity and corruption common to such affairs, was at the heart of local and international politics during the coming twelve years.

A definitive stage was being reached for the political future of Germany and for the organisational future of Christianity everywhere. In Nuremberg and the surrounding Margraviate of Brandenburg-Ansbach, documents, emerged to regularise Christian liturgy and discipline. On 1 August 1532 the four Wittenberg leaders, Luther, Melancthon, Jonas and Bugenhagen, sent their comments on an Ordinance submitted to them, approving it in principle. It concerned the use of excommunication by the new Christian authorities, and other difficult matters like the celebration of Mass when there was no congregation (not approved) and the reservation of the Sacrament — also not approved because Communion should not be separated from the Word. Luther had earlier been in correspondence with Link, still the Pastor at Nuremberg, on the regulation of baptism. (Link had also sent him some oranges, a wash basin and a candelabrum, with no note — Luther asked whether they were a gift, or what.) In April 1533 Luther was again in contact with Nuremberg about Confession, insisting, with Melancthon, that both public and voluntary private confession should be retained. In the letter of 1532 the Wittenbergers had expressed concern about being thrust into the position of assessors of new norms. But the logic of the situation demanded it ‘in order to maintain pure teaching, and also external Christian discipline and behaviour . . .until the Almighty grants more peace and unity both in ecclesiastical and political governments’.

The Peace of Nuremberg had included an item obliging the signatories to assist the Emperor in the defence of Europe against the Turks. Swiftly came a request, in August 1532, to Luther from Duke Joachim of Brandenburg, who was to lead a contingent of the Saxon army against the Turks. He wanted prayers for his undertaking and spiritual advice. In the old days he would have had a blessing from the local bishop and an Indulgence. In his response, serious and detailed, almost paternal, if not quite episcopal or pontifical, Luther said he wished to move out to war spiritually with our earnest prayers, to join with the dear Emperor Charles and his soldiers’ — he still thought Charles V ill-advised rather than perverse. He spoke of the dangers of useless self-congratulation: they were not to place reliance in the Turks being altogether wrong and God’s enemy while we are innocent and righteous. . . rather fight in the fear of God and in reliance on his grace alone. . . I pray that in such a war our people by no means seek honour, glory, land, booty, etc., but only the glory of God and. . . defence of poor Christians and subjects . . . May Your Sovereign Grace now go forth in God’s name, . . . Our Pater Noster shall follow you.

In the summer of 1532, the Emperor left Germany and was not forcefully present again for nearly a decade. He could not move far between November and March each year on account of weather and transport difficulties; and his pressing concerns were in areas widely separated geographically; the Turks in eastern Europe, his Spanish territories in Italy, the attempt to insist with the Pope on the calling of a Council, Spain itself, a new war with France (in conspiracy with the German Protestants), a revolt in the Netherlands, and the Turks again, in Northern Africa. In the Emperor’s long absence the Church reforms in Germany spread more widely and pushed their roots more deeply down. They went hand in hand with reforms in Switzerland and Scandinavia and to a lesser extent in some parts of France, and in England. Luther was free again to follow all the normal demands on his time, university lectures (Galatians, Psalms, Genesis) sermons in the town, Bible translation and activities in the whole field of strengthening the new or reformed Church institutions. In spite of increasing illness, vigorous initiatives began to flow from him again. Sometimes he felt a decline in energy and output; in 1534 he wrote to a friend Schlaginhaufen: ‘I do not know how the days pass without me achieving what I would like and want to do. I live such a useless life that I cannot stand myself.’ However, inner desperation was held at bay. Domestic life enlivened him.

On his return from the Coburg the family had welcomed him home, his wife Katherine, four-year-old Hans, baby Lenchen, Seeberger the handyman, Jerome Weller the tutor, and Aunt Lena. Family life burgeoned. They took in a number of orphan children. Students boarded. Relations and friends visited. The garden did well and increased in size. Pig-keeping was undertaken. Katie brewed beer where lay brothers had brewed it in days gone by. Eventually, in 1540, with a view to her widowhood, Luther bought for her from her brother a little farm at Zolsdorf, south of Leipzig, and she spent a few weeks there in the year. The door into the old Priory, now the ‘Lutherhaus’, was ever open. In and out went young students and old students, fellow lecturers and their families, preachers and pastors and their families, men from the Elector, men from the local Council local residents, men and women with their various problems. And occasionally came representatives from afar, from England, even from the papacy, implicitly recognising Luther’s new status.

The German prophet became a patriarch, and the living room was dominated by his presence. He enjoyed his beer and had a great mug with three rings on it, one ‘the Ten Commandments’, the next ‘the Creed’ and third ‘the Lord’s Prayer’. He boasted that he could encompass all three with ease. Once in 1535 away from home he wrote to his wife about some bad beer he had drunk ‘which did not agree with me, so that I had to sing. . .I said to myself what good wine and beer I have at home, and also what a pretty lady, or lord.’ On another occasion, he told Katie how well he was sleeping because of the beer but that he was ‘sober as in Wittenberg’.

They sat down to meals sometimes a dozen and a half, or more. Luther would grow irritated as everyone came to hang on his word. Sometimes he was silent and all were silent. He was ill with ringing in the ear, violent headaches, stone. He was not often contradicted. Melancthon came in and would dissent, so quietly that no one heard. But Katie spoke up, and there was usually some young man jotting down the table talk — openly, and with the approval of the master who sometimes gave a specific direction about what to write. Graduate Johann Schlaginhaufen recorded in April 1532 that Luther came out with the remark:

Luther enjoyed getting a spirited response out of his wife. She managed him and tolerated his wayward reactions, his sometimes coarse but not obscene conversation and his increasingly frequent illness in a way which some thought he hardly deserved. He would suddenly erupt with: ‘The world is a gigantic anus and I am a ripe stool, ready to drop from it.’ Then in a moment he was back on the religious tack. When he was depressed and despairing he said that a word from ‘Pomeranus or Philip or indeed my Katie’ would bring him round: ‘I was comforted as I realised that God was saying this through a brother who was speaking it from duty or from love.’ The marriage was happy. They were real companions and friends to each other. ‘There is no sweeter union than that of a good marriage. Nor is there any death more bitter than that which separates a married couple. Only the death of children comes close to this; how much this hurts I know from experience.’

In November 1532, Martin Luther the second was born. A month later, when Katie was finding the trials of the children too much, Luther passed the remark: ‘God must be friendlier to me and speak to me in friendlier fashion than my Katie to little Martin.’ Seven months later Katie was pregnant again, and Luther repeated a phrase which had been made before on the difficulties of a mother swiftly pregnant again while still nursing a previous infant: ‘It is difficult to feed two guests, one in the house and the other at the door.’

In November 1532, Luther wrote to Amsdorf, now Pastor in Magdeburg: ‘My Katie is ill from lack of sleep and close to her delivery.’ In January 1588, he wrote to a friend in the Electoral service, Johann Loser, asking him to be godfather to his son ‘whom God has given me this night by my dear Katie, so that he may come out of the old Adam’s nature to the rebirth in Christ through the holy sacrament of baptism, and may become a member of sacred Christendom. Perhaps the Lord God may wish to raise a new enemy of the Pope or the Turk. I would very much like to have him baptised around the hour of vespers and then he will be a heathen no more.’ He ended the letter ‘at 1 am, in the night of 29 January 1583’. The new child was named Paul. The sixth and last child Margaret, was born on 17 December 1534.

Marriage and its problems, including the trauma of marital breakdown, occupied Luther’s mind much at this time: ‘Marriage consists of these things: the natural desire of sex, the bringing to life of children, and life together with mutual fidelity. Yet the devil can so rupture marriage that hate is never more bitter.’ Luther’s solution was to start off in the right way. The breakdown ‘comes from our beginning everything without prayer, and with presumption. A God-fearing young man who is about to be married should pray "Dear God, add thy blessing."’Veit Dietrich recorded this in the early spring of 1532 when he was soon to be married. ‘So, dear Master Veit, do as I did. When I wished to take my Katie I prayed to God earnestly. You ought to do this too.’

The domestic scene was conjured up in many of Dietrich’s entries. Luther’s dog Tolpel ‘watched with open mouth and motionless eyes, and Luther said "Oh if I could only pray the way this dog watches the food! All his thoughts are concentrated on the chunk of meat."’ Another time, when Luther was ‘writing or doing something else, my Hans may sing a little tune to me. If he becomes too noisy I tell him off a bit, and he continues to sing but does it more to himself and with a certain concern and uneasiness. This is what God wishes; that we be always cheerful, but reverently.’

There were the ordinary disagreements between husband and wife. ‘"Anger in the home is God’s plaything; it’s only like a slap or a cuff from him. Political fury, on the other hand, carries away wife and child through massacre and war. . . If I can put up with battles with the devil, sin and a bad conscience, then I can also put up with the irritations of Katie von Bora." This he said when he happened to get involved in a quarrel with his wife about some trifling thing.’ But conscience still made a coward of him: ‘Without the forgiveness of sins I can’t stand a bad conscience at all; the devil hounds me about a single sin until the world becomes too small for me, and afterwards I feel like spitting on myself for having been afraid of such a small thing.’

Luther was aware of his own tiresome nature, and of his anger, yet often defended it. ‘When asked by the younger Margrave why he wrote with such vehemence he said, "Our Lord God must precede a heavy shower with thunder and then let it rain in a very gentle fashion so that the ground becomes soaked through. To put it differently, I can cut through a willow branch with a knife, but to cut through oak requires an axe and wedge, and even with these one can hardly split it."’ Again, ‘Philip stabs, too, but only with pins and needles. The pricks are hard to heal and they hurt. But when I stab I do it with a heavy pike of the sort used for hunting boars.’ Philip must have found the pike stabs quite painful, too, presumably, but somehow they expected such things from Luther and it was not intolerable. They listened with some resignation as he held forth: ‘I am free from avarice, my age and bodily weakness protect me from sensual desire, and I am not afflicted with hate or envy towards anybody. Up to now only anger remains in me, and for the most part this is necessary and just. But I have other sins that are greater.’

The other ‘sins’ were still grouped around lack of faith, and the tendency to despair. In 1538 the Table Talk has ‘My temptation is this, that I think I don’t have a gracious God — Beware of melancholy.’ Life was unacceptably burdensome and he felt he only kept on through a continually repeated act of turning to God, and by spontaneity of action. ‘No good work is undertaken with prudent reflection. It must all happen in a half-sleep. This is how I was forced to take up the office of teaching. If I had known what I know now, ten horses would not have driven me to it.’ But once he had been called to be a Professor, and notably a Doctor, there must be no turning back. And now, in his fifties, he was irreversibly involved in the shaping of new forms of Church and State. They were not wholly new, since there had always been local independence. But now this independence was being given doctrines and institutions. And, although previously there had been translations of the Bible, the wide and entirely new availability of the New Testament and later of the whole Bible was central to them, and also entirely without precedent.

The translation of the Old Testament had taken a leap forward during the five and a half months at the Coburg. Luther pondered on the principles involved, and on the strictures of his critics. In the 1520s, Duke George of Albertine Saxony had commissioned Luther’s old enemy, ‘the Goat’ Emser, to produce a competing translation of the New Testament, acceptable to Catholics. Emser produced a translation which looked very like Luther’s, at first sight, with some of the same woodcuts by Cranach; but also very like at second sight. Although Emser said he had translated from the ‘orthodox’ Latin of Jerome’s Vulgate, in fact it soon became clear that he had lifted long sequences straight from Luther’s own translation. ‘Just take the two Testaments, Luther’s and the scribblers, compare them; you will see who is the translator in both of them. He has patched and altered it in a few places . . . I had to laugh at the great wisdom which so terribly slandered, condemned and forbade my New Testament when it was published under my name, but made it required reading when it was published under the name of another,’ wrote Luther in a piece about translating the Bible, written at the Coburg. He enjoyed his running battles with Duke George. An illustration to the first edition of his New Testament had shown ‘the whore of Babylon’ (featured in the last book of the New Testament), wearing a triple crown — clearly it was the papal tiara. Old Frederick the Wise had received such a blast of complaint from Duke George that in the next edition the headpiece had to be cut down to a single crown. But later again, Luther had the triple tiara reinstated.

In the text on translation Luther defended his addition of the word ‘alone’ to St Paul’s famous definition of justification by faith. Luther said he was only bringing out the real sense of the original Greek. Previous interpreters, including Aquinas, had made the point before. St Paul did clearly mean ‘by faith alone’. Luther also defended his translation of the famous words in St Luke’s Gospel of the angel telling Mary that she would have a child. Instead of ‘Hail Mary full of grace, he had translated: ‘Dear Mary, thou most gracious one.’ In reply to critics, Luther attacked the old literal translation: ‘Tell me . . . when does a German speak like that, "You are full of grace"?. . . He would have to think of a keg "full of" beer, or a purse "full of" money. So I have translated it "Thou gracious one" and then a German can at least think his way through to what the angel means by this greeting.’

Why should I talk so much about translating? . . . well, I would need a year to say everything. . . I have never taken nor looked for a single penny for it, nor made one. Neither have I looked for any honour from it. God my Lord knows that. Rather have I done it as a service to the dear Christians. . . have not just gone ahead any old how and disregarded the exact wording of the original. Rather with my assistants l have been very careful to see that where everything depends on a single passage, I have kept to the original quite literally.

For a while in early 1531, the Bible Translation Committee reassembled in a number of sessions to give a final revision to the translation of the Psalms. Matthew Aurogallus, still the Hebrew professor, was always there, and of course Philip Melancthon, the Greek expert. The fourth member was the Professor of Theology, Caspar Cruciger; and finally the Master Secretary, Georg Rorer. In his Introduction to the subsequent definitive draft of the Psalms in German, Luther expounded their method again and threw out a challenge: ‘We praised the principle of at times retaining the words quite literally, and at other times rendering only the meaning . . . if my critics are so tremendously learned and want to display their skill, I wish they would take that single and very common little Hebrew word, chen, and give me a good translation of it. I will give fifty gulden to him who translates this word appropriately and accurately throughout the entire Scriptures.’ Luther’s translation of the Bible survived in active use into the present century, praised by Catholic and Protestant alike, and formative of the framework, style and idiom of the German language.

Luther’s mind continually came back to that which had been central to his life for so long, the principal liturgical action of the Christian Myth, the Mass. He wished to celebrate it only in the context of the ‘Word’, the message of Jesus of Nazareth, Christ, speaking through the Bible. But he did still wish to keep the reformed Mass central. At the Coburg he wrote: ‘Admonition concerning the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Lord.’ It was a pastor’s text, expounding the reasons why people should go to Mass and take communion. While not a ‘sacrifice’ as a good work, Mass was a ‘sacrifice of thanksgiving’. He pointed out that Christians of the first centuries called it eucharist, thanksgiving, and the sacrament of thanksgiving. By it

Christians were reminded of grace; faith and love were stimulated. One should take part often, It was easy to put it off and say ‘I will go next week’, and then faith grew cold until one ‘becomes completely bored of thinking about "his dear Saviour."’ He had experienced this himself, putting it off from week to week: ‘I broke out of the vicious circle and took part in the Sacrament, even without making confession’ — he assured the reader that he had not been guilty of any gross sins. His approach here is indistinguishable from that of the most conventional Catholic. ‘Where such faith is thus continually refreshed and renewed, there the heart is also at the same time refreshed anew in its love of neighbour and is made strong and equipped to do all good works and to resist sin and all temptations of the devil . . .’ He repeated a facetious approach, also part of the traditional armoury of Catholic spiritual advisers. Someone who thought he did not need to take the sacrament had to be a saint already: ‘Bells should be rung wherever you go on the street to tell of the saint coming.’

The subject of the eucharist was never far from his mind. He was still fighting to retain what he saw to be the true tradition and meaning as against other Reformers who wished to ‘spiritualise’ it, and against the practice of the papal authorities who had not modified their functional and canonical position. Bucer was the principal go-between with the other Reformers and found himself closer to Luther’s view than he had at one time thought he was. Eventually, a new statement of reformed doctrine on the eucharist was agreed in the Concord of Wittenberg (1536). It preserved above all the idea of divine initiative in an objectively significant sacramental act; it was signed by a wide range of representatives except for the Anabaptists. The latter remained apart, retaining something like the position of many ‘heretics’ of the previous several hundred years; they continued to attract many converts and martyrs. They rejected infant baptism and declined to respect the authority of the local minister and Christian community, whether papal or Lutheran, trusting to a ‘spiritual’ and unstructured approach.

In his fundamental acceptance of a single visible Church with appointed ministers and a sacramental structure, the position of Luther was closer to that of Rome than to that of the Anabaptists. But little or no progress was being made towards an understanding with the papal authorities, and Luther was continually stung by the absence of any practical response to his criticism of received Church practices, criticism which had been admitted quite widely as justified. The Mass still seemed in effect to be bought, particularly in the case of money left in a will to pay for priests to say Masses for one’s soul, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of Masses. The associated scandal of Indulgences remained untouched. The whole solid structure of the ordained priesthood and of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice remained unreformed along with its financial basis. Luther started off on another attempt to explain what was wrong and to denounce it in ‘The Private Mass and the Ordination of Priests’.

He went once again into the basis of the celebration of Mass. One of the old names for Mass was communion, a direct contradiction of a privatam missam, the private Mass. Then he remembered incidents from his early life. The text became an angry tirade. He recalled how his fellow priests had in many cases become very casual, and how in Rome ‘I heard, among other clever and coarse anecdotes at mealtimes, members of the papal curia laugh and boast about how some said Mass and with reference to the bread and wine spoke these words:‘"Panis es, panis manebis; vinum es, vinum manebis" — "Bread you are and bread you shall remain; wine you are, and wine you shall remain" — and with these words they elevated the host and the wine in the usual way. Now I was a young and particularly earnest devout religious. . . What was I to think of such words?. . .It also disgusted me very much that they could say Mass with such assurance and expertise and in such haste as if they were engaged in juggling. For before I had reached the Gospel reading [less than halfway through the text], the priest next to me had concluded his Mass, and they called aloud to me: "Passa, passa — hurry up, hurry up."’

It was this ‘juggling’, this seemingly magical element that still offended Luther so deeply, and he criticised theological theories, enshrined in such a phrase as ex opere operato, referring in various ways to the automatic realisation of a sacrament when performed correctly by a properly ordained priest, with little or nothing said about the recipient and the faith he should have. He also ridiculed the use of chrism (olive oil scented with balsam) in anointing, which was an obligatory part of the sacraments of baptism confirmation and ordination. In place of the doctrine that only an ordained priest could perform a sacrament and in particular effect the ‘miracle’ of transubstantiation, Luther said that every baptised Christian was a true priest.

Sitting in the barber’s chair at Wittenberg, one day, Luther was talking to his old friend Peter Beksendorf, who had been cutting hair and beards there for many years. The barber said he did not know how to pray. This was a challenge. In a few hours Luther had sketched out what amounted to a new version of the Little Catechism, presented more personally and biographically. His text on how to pray went through twenty editions. ‘I will tell you as best I can what I do personally when I pray. . .’ He was still using the well-tried texts of the old tradition, and his childhood, the Our Father, the Ten Commandments, the Creed. His recommendations differed little from what had been taught for centuries, only they were shorn of the incentives provided by Indulgences and the earning of merit, and of the fulsome prayers to and reliance on Mary the Mother of Jesus, and the Saints, which had often almost submerged the biblical texts and Creed. ‘I take my prayer book and hurry to my room, or if it be the day and hour . . . to the church.’ He recited to himself slowly, meaning the words, and seeing how they might apply in his day, the Our Father, the Ten Commandments and the Creed. Watch out for those deluding ideas: "Wait a little. I will pray in an hour; first I must attend to this."’ Work could be prayer. But actual prayer still needed to be done, and the only way was not to put it off Mornings and evenings were the times. Luther said people should make their own applications, and they were not to treat the actual words as essential — if they found personal prayers welling up of their own accord. The texts were not incantations. But ‘a good and attentive barber keeps his thoughts, attention and eyes on the razor and hair and does not forget how far he has got with his shaving or cutting. If he wants to engage in too much conversation or let his mind wander or look somewhere else, he is likely to cut his customer’s mouth, nose or even his throat. . . How much more does prayer call for concentration.’

At this time, Luther was preaching on St John’s Gospel at the parish church. Though he was the reformed practical pastor, the incarnational theology which he preached still had about it something of the divine glow of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Rhineland movements, as he preached on Jesus of Nazareth, son of God, and man’s nourishment: ‘God has set his seal on the Son, who is man. He is the food, but also the grain merchant, the baker, the waiter, and the storehouse.’ Christ tears all our hearts and eyes away from all bakeries and granaries, from all cellars, shops, fields, and purses, yes, from labour at all, and points them to Himself’. He was ‘the bread, the dish and the plate that gives us imperishable food’. And he made ‘one cake’, ein Kuchen of us all. Divinity and humanity were ‘one cake’ in Christ.

Although Luther was not the Wittenberg parish priest, often it was the pastor talking, drawing on twenty-five years’ experience of death beds, marriages, baptisms, and the giving of counsel in every kind of trouble. The counsel he gave was strongly rooted in a Saxon religion, five centuries old or more, itself stemming from a religious tradition of a millennium in the Mediterranean basin, the Roman and the Celtic lands. There was a traditional piety about it. But he was putting a renewed biblical stamp on it, practical, personal and with a mark of violent antithesis to some of the standard conventions. However, in situations of need his human sympathy was still expressed in tones of late medieval piety:

That sickness of yours is God’s fatherly, gracious chastisement. . . you should accept it with thankfulness as being sent by God’s grace . . . how slight a suffering it is, even if it be sickness into death, compared with the sufferings of his own dear Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. . . You also know the true centre and foundation of your salvation from whom you are to seek comfort in this and all troubles, namely Jesus Christ, the cornerstone. He will not waver or fail us . He says ‘Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world . . .’ Let us therefore now rejoice with all assurance and gladness, and should any thought of sin or death frighten us, let us oppose it and lift up our hearts and say: ‘Look, dear soul, what are you doing: Dear death, dear sin how is it that you are alive and terrify me? Do you not know that you have been overcome? Do you, death, not know that you are quite dead?’

These words came from a letter which began: ‘My dearest mother, I have had a letter from my brother James about your illness.’ It continued after the excerpt above: "‘Be of good cheer" by such words and none other, let your heart be moved, dear mother’, and she was to be thankful that she lived in a time when they no longer had to see Jesus as a Judge. He continually repeated the words ‘Be of good cheer’, and drew fresh comfort from them. And finally: ‘All our children and my Katie pray for you; some weep, others say at dinner: "Grandma is very ill."

God’s grace be with us all. Amen. 20 May 1531. Your loving son. Martin Luther.’

The streets of Wittenberg were different. There were no friars and many fewer Massing priests as the castle church gradually transformed its liturgical life. Tensions were still there, some just as before, some new. The ideals and demands of religion were still there. There was still fear of death and judgement, heaven or hell. Obedience was still required to the great negatives, not to murder, slander, steal or take another man’s wife; and God should still alone be worshipped, and parents should be honoured. The two last commandments were emphasised more than before. And here was both a new tension and a new opening. The preachers spoke more directly and practically of spiritual things and with less fantastic metaphors. And those who could read or could listen to someone reading aloud, began to know more of the foundation document of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth became more ‘available’; a wider vocabulary both of humanity and of divinity reached them. The Church services themselves, the prayers and the hymns and psalms were in their own language. Though still the stock-in-trade of professional priests, the rites were less distant, people went to communion more often, receiving the consecrated wine as well as the consecrated bread both together being the sacrament of the Saviour, bringing his real presence.

There was some loss. The houses of vowed religious, though often so worldly and often denaturing the message of Jesus of Nazareth, had still in spite of everything spoken of the selfless and encouraging commitment of their founders, and had enabled some men and women to live out lives of inspiring charity and holiness. The perpetual round of prayers of praise, thanksgiving and petition in the churches had still spoken of God’s all-comprehending presence. The absence was not all good. Some negative, primitive and cruel aspects of society remained largely unchanged. Witches were still burnt. ‘Heretics’ were still burnt, though the exact process by which they came to be judged to be in heresy was different. In some towns torture and judicial murder still thrived. Strange signs in the sky, the birth of deformed children, the mentally handicapped, vivid dreams all still roused inarticulate fear. But the beginning of a new atmosphere was apparent. The mentally handicapped and indigent old people who now inhabited the old Cistercian monastery of Haine in Hesse was a symbol of a society taking a new control over itself. It was not a simple process. In Nuremberg the burghers had, already prior to the Reform movement, taken over many aspects of life previously controlled by the Church. Reform in that town led to more not less supervision of life by the church in the form of the new Lutheran pastors.

The transformation of society that was just beginning, was one still inside the old medieval unity. Religion continued to dominate all. Indeed, a new religious authoritarianism was already apparent, though more local, more ‘moral’ and more Saxon. It was some generations before the first emphatic notes of an alternative, agnostic, sometimes atheist ideology were to be heard regularly, and two more centuries before it began to burgeon to produce a quite new, secularised world. In that world the Myth would have to find a new place, supported by its followers, sometimes by states and wealthy institutions and persons, for reasons ambiguous, not wholly welcome or at least somewhat disharmonious with the message at the heart of the Myth. Christianity spoke of a Founder who had been property-less and had died as a criminal. The gospel message always tended to be contradicted by its medium. But something like a purification of Christianity, the beginning of its removal from any final dependence on other social institutions, had now been set on foot.

The Saxon streets of the 1530s witnessed the first bemused blinkings of Christianity reborn, re-identifying itself from its sources and wondering what its forms should be. There were still churches, the local community still met in them, there was still a local and apparently universal Church community. How to define it properly continued to worry Melancthon, and he continued to try to see the reformed local churches in Germany as bodies that should really be in communion with the rest of the western Church, centred in Rome. About this latter ‘worldly’ matter, Luther worried little. Preaching, administering the sacraments, praying, and doing one’s job in life, here and now, was the task of a Christian — it was God’s rather than Man’s concern to see how the world aggregate of such activities hung together. He believed in the Church as a local, ‘face-to-face’ community of believers such as he had understood the early Christians to have formed. But a sense of need for conformity and consistency over a large geographical area did not go away. As the reformed Churches grew up, their leaders, independent of Rome, had regularly to take crucial decisions which were destined to serve as precedents and formers of fresh traditions In the future Protestant and Anglican Churches. And Luther’s own theology of the Church did itself encourage the formation of new visible structures substituted for the Roman papal structure. His thoughts on the Church were high. The Church was the bride of Christ, and although it was composed of a people scattered abroad throughout the world, the Church was ‘one body with Christ through faith’; and this unity he loved to illustrate: ‘The husband confides all his secrets to his wife; she has become part of his body, and she bears the keys at her side. In just this way Christ is the bridegroom and flesh of our flesh.’

The most notable and the most ironical aspect of the new Churches was that, in order to make themselves independent of the great units of Empire and Papacy, they fell, almost inevitably it seems, into the arms of the lesser local political units, the newly maturing nation states. The bonds of political authority bound ever tighter. And the doctrine of the ‘Godly prince’ led to conclusions far from welcome to Luther, notably the persecution of the Anabaptists. Essentially, he wanted to let these ‘heretics believe what they wished — faith could not be forced: ‘It is not right that the poor people are so pitifully executed, burnt. . . . Let everyone believe what he likes . . . one should oppose them with Scripture and God’s word. Fire achieves nothing.’ But, exactly as with the medieval papacy, he found himself agreeing with the state that their heterodox beliefs were in effect ‘seditious’.

In a Memorandum of 1536, he and Melancthon advised Philip of Hesse that Anabaptists by their rejection of government, private property and other social structures were in effect guilty of deliberate sedition, and this in spite of the hesitations of Philip of Hesse himself. Luther worried about it, and added to the Memorandum a recommendation to mercy. But the logic of his position was difficult to evade and behind his texts on ‘The Infiltrating and Clandestine Preachers’ (1532) lurked the same appeal to charges of sedition as had lurked behind his denunciations of Muntzer in the early 1520s. In the 1532 text he wrote: ‘I have been told how these infiltrators worm their way to harvesters and preach to them in the field during their work, as well as to the solitary workers at charcoal kilns or in the woods.’ Luther deprecated their going to work secretly. If they thought they had a call from God let them go about it publicly and go first to their local pastor. ‘If God wants to accomplish something over and beyond this order of office and calling and to raise up someone who is above the prophets, he will demonstrate this with signs. . . When God does not do so we are to remain obedient to the office and authority already ordained.’ The place of true spiritual authority was in practice difficult to identify with certainty when there were competing candidates. Special signs from God were needed if the, as it were, failed candidate was yet to be recognised.

The year before Luther and Melancthon wrote their Memorandum, there occurred the violent take-over of the town of Munster by Anabaptists, declaring they had guidance and revelation to unseat the government. There followed a year of cruel tyranny and chaos which looked like a justification of what had been written about the dangers of Anabaptists to the State. The majority Protestant position increasingly came to be identified with that of local political authority. Luther himself sometimes saw nothing to worry about and was happy with the situation. History was unknowingly adapted: ‘Orders in the Church are civil positions which were taken over and made into spiritual offices’, was recorded in the ‘Table Talk’.

The irresistible drive towards local political sovereignty was present in England as elsewhere. Henry VIII found a minister of great efficiency, Thomas Cromwell, driven by a twofold wish to rationalise and then close down or transform the religious houses, or to produce a useful adjunct of property and wealth to his sovereign, all things which he could see being done in the German lands. But it was not that which precipitated a formal quarrel with the papacy itself. Henry needed to have a blessing and judicial seal from the Lords of the Myth, from the Pope and bishops, on his persecution of his ex-Queen and wife, Katherine of Aragon, aunt of the Emperor, to have a formal divorce from her and a recognition of his marriage to Anne Boleyn, on which he pinned his hopes for a male heir. Sexual gratification as such was not in question. The optional taking of numerous mistresses was conventional in every court from that of the Pope and Emperor downwards — Charles V was notorious for the number of his illegitimate children. A slight complication had indeed arisen in that Anne had held out for the position of Queen as long as she dare before admitting Henry to her bed. However, in any case, Henry needed his first marriage of twenty years standing to be nullified. His case was that since Katherine had previously been married to his brother Arthur who died aged fifteen, the Pope should never have given him permission to marry his deceased brother’s wife. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, died in 1582. It was the King’s opportunity. He had been granting swift promotion in diplomatic service abroad to a Cambridge don, who had suggested that the universities of Europe might be persuaded to give an opinion supporting the nullifying of his first marriage. Thomas Cranmer’s name was sent to Rome as the best (and only) choice for the vacant See. He was duly appointed and as soon as possible held a Church Court hearing to annul the first marriage, and then officiated at the coronation of the greatly pregnant Anne.

In the course of the enquiries to the universities about Henry VIII’s marriage problems, the query reached Wittenberg. In a letter to the Englishman, Robert Barnes, Luther wrote out an exposition of the problem. Unabashed that he found himself on the same side as the papacy (which had declined to grant a divorce) and of the conservative University of Louvain, which he commonly castigated, and out of step with most of the other European universities which had all been bribed, he came down resoundingly with a judgement of authentic common sense and morality. A man might not thus easily disown his wife. Under no circumstances will the King be free to divorce the Queen to whom he is married, the wife of his deceased brother, and thus make the mother as well as the daughter into incestuous women. . .Before I would approve of such a divorce I would rather permit the King to marry a second woman and to have, according to the examples of the patriarchs and kings, two wives or queens at the same time.’ The possibility of bigamy or polygamy, following Old Testament example, had often been canvassed and Luther’s suggestion was nothing unusual. At the risk of losing his salvation and under the threat of eternal damnation, the King is to be held responsible for retaining the Queen to whom he is married.’ The marriage of a deceased wife’s brother was forbidden in the Old Testament. But so was it to remain uncircumcised. ‘The legislator Moses is dead and invalid for us. Matrimony is a matter of divine and natural law. In cases where the divine and the positive laws contradict each other, the positive law must yield to the divine law.’ Luther’s grasp of the legality and the morality of the situation was integrated and convincing. He shone a largely unwelcome light on the matter.

In spite of this rebuff, Henry and his ministers from time to time made overtures in the direction of the Schmalkaldic League, seeking for a satisfactory alignment in relation to the Emperor or to ecclesiastical developments. An attempt was made to get Melancthon to go to England, and a similar attempt was made by the French government to get him to go to France. He was a scholar of prestige who wanted to keep things together and could be relied on not to make trouble. Luther was consulted on both occasions and tried to persuade the Elector to let Melancthon go, but the Elector had no special reason for sending hostages to either country, and Melancthon had to remain in Saxony. Henry wanted to be invited to join the Schmalkaldic League; and he wanted to deign to join it, without any doctrinal strings attached. Protracted negotiations finally led to a nil result in 1536 when the Elector and the League as a whole continued to insist on formal assent to the Confession of Augsburg, but also now to the new Articles agreed at the Concord of Wittenberg in that same year.

Still trying to agree on a definition of the Eucharist, theologians over a wide range of background had finally agreed in the Wittenberg Concord that ‘with the consecrated bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ are truly and substantially present, shown forth and received’, also that the sacrament has its authentic value in the Church and does not depend on the status of either the minister or the recipient. Soon after the English delegates had declined to agree to the doctrinal demands, the horrific news arrived of Anne Boleyn’s execution. The Elector was glad the English had left the Continent empty-handed, and that he had not agreed to Melancthon’s trip. Luther himself had been mystified by the varying attitudes of Robert Barnes, at one moment apparently a crypto-ambassador of Henry VIII and the next moment in terror for his life. In a letter to Thomas Cromwell he showed he was as good as the next man at saying little in the nicest possible way. However, as a reformer Cromwell could be encouraged: ‘You are capable of accomplishing very many things throughout the whole kingdom, and with the Most Serene Lord King you can do much good. I do pray and shall pray to the Lord to strengthen abundantly his work . . . Through Doctor Barnes, Your Lordship, whom I commend to the Father’s mercy, will become thoroughly acquainted with the situation here. Wittenberg, 9 April 1536. Your Lordship’s dedicated Martin Luther, Doctor.’ More to the point for Luther had been William Tyndale’s achievements. But now in this year came the news of his violent death in Brussels, having been arrested for heresy by agents of the local Council in the Imperial city.

Tyndale had come to Wittenberg for a short time in 1525, going on to Cologne and then to Worms where he completed the printing of his translation into English of the New Testament. He finally settled in Antwerp in a house belonging to the association of English merchants who had been his patrons in London and enabled him to start on the translation work. In Antwerp he remained translating the Old Testament and reissuing the New, for which he provided Introductions inspired by Luther until 1536 when he was lured out of the protection of the merchants’ house. Tyndale’s work and martyrdom was one of similar events throughout northern Europe, news of which kept reaching Luther. Reforms progressed in Iceland, Scotland, Scandinavia and Denmark.

In 1536 Luther heard of things in Switizerland which he liked more than the Zwinglianism of previous years. Young Jean Calvin had arrived in Geneva, and published the work which he had been writing to justify and reorientate himself after his conversion to the reforming camp. A Renaissance humanist of formidable ability, he proceeded to provide a detailed Summa —something much more substantial than Melancthon’s Commonplaces. He called it Institutio Religionis Christiani, and had it published in Geneva. Later, in 1539, Luther read with delight Calvin’s reply to Jacopo Sadoleto, a Catholic Reformer who was trying to persuade the Church in Geneva to return to papal obedience. Calvin’s reply, from Strassburg, was a sign of a new generation of intellectually well-based reformers.

The University continued to be at the heart of Luther’s daily life and if the plague kept returning so did good reasons for celebrations and feasts. For most of the decade he was regularly reappointed as Dean of the Theology Faculty. In that capacity he wrote in 1535 to Melancthon, at that time living away from Wittenberg with other members of the University on account of the plague. There was to be a disputation, graduation ceremony and a feast in honour of Jerome Weller:

‘Here are the disputation papers, excellent Philip, which we would kindly ask you to distribute to the theological candidates. . . I have been suffering from diarrhoea.’ He was weak, could not sleep, and there was no beer in the town. ‘In the last two days I have had fifteen bowel movements.’ To Jonas, Luther wrote: ‘The chief cook, our Lord Katie, asks you to accept this coin and to buy for us poultry or other birds, or whatever in the airy kingdom of our feathered friends is subject to the dominion of man (and may be eaten) — but for God’s sake no ravens. . . bring rabbit or similar meaty delicacies. . . My Katie has brewed seven Quartalia . . . into which she has mixed thirty-two Scheffel of malt. . . She hopes it will turn out to be good beer. Whatever it is, you and others will be tasting it!’ Then came some blustery comment on the international news of the Emperor, about Africa and Constantinople, sharp remarks on their mixing the old religious styles with their fighting, and some classical references to Terence, and finally: ‘My Katie cordially and reverently greets you and all your family. But hold a minute, if my wife greets you, I, in turn greet your wife. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Farewell in the Lord! 4 September 1535. Yours, Martin Luther.’

In the daytime he could rejoice. At night-time the horrors came. But the next day he could share them with his family and house guests. Dietrich noted down in the spring of 1583, with Luther’s own approval, as a source of comfort to others who suffer such terrors:

It was at this time that he recollected how Staupitz had said he did not understand him and reminisced about the old days.

When I was sad and downcast, Staupitz started to talk to me at table and asked: Why are you so sad?’ I replied, ‘Well, what on earth can I do?’ Then he said, ‘You don’t know how necessary this is for you; otherwise nothing good will come of you.’ He himself didn’t understand what he said, for he thought I was too learned and that I would become haughty if I remained free from spiritual trials. But I took his words to be like Paul’s, ‘A thorn was given me in the flesh to keep me from being too elated . . . the Lord said to me "My power is made perfect in weakness"’.

Luther was often still obsessed with thoughts of what had flowed from his actions — was it really all right? He comforted himself with having sincerely answered a ‘Call’, words from his superiors and his brothers in the monastic community. He made this an example for all life: ‘One should be glad to have a brother who says "Brother, do this, for it is the call of your superior or of God (which is a call of faith) or of an equal (which is a call of love)". Nobody realised how great and necessary a place was occupied by the calling, by saying to someone "Do this".’

These were traditional Christian precepts, redeployed to show that at their heart was not a threatening God but an all loving, all understanding God. It still seemed like thin ice, sometimes. It was still strange to sit in the living room to live with his wife and children in the old Friary buildings. So much to be done always, so much still wrong, but so much about it also seemed right. News from England came that reformers there were still accepting the idea of the unattended private Mass. He wrote to Jonas (October 1535): ‘I am thinking about putting theses together against the private Mass . . . My lord Katie sends greetings; she drives the wagon, takes care of the fields, buys and puts cattle out to pasture, brews, etc. In between she starts to read the Bible, and I have promised her fifty guilden if she finishes before Easter.’ Then a sentence in German: ‘she is very serious’; then back to the Latin used in all letters except to those who might not understand it, officials of State and Church, his wife and, in the past, his father and mother.

The depression syndrome led to bouts of exaggerated pleasure or displeasure. At the Coburg, Luther had written: ‘The world hates me and I hate the world.’ Feelings of hopelessness and despair continued to invade him, and bursts of great anger. The mood became particularly unnerving, to himself and to others, when he was expected to act as an Authority. In 1586, when the theologians gathered for the meeting at Wittenberg, having had to come from Eisenach and Torgau because Luther was not well enough to go there, he lectured them like schoolchildren, himself almost intolerably overcome with irritation. Then, suddenly, the ‘Concord’ was worked out and accepted, and he was transfigured with joy, and a feast was laid on.

But if it was still possible to think of trying to work out an agreement with other reformers, towards Rome his mind had become totally closed and what seems like compulsive abuse was directed at them. And any mention of Erasmus was liable to lead to a string of expletives. Yet if the abuse was compulsive, he would still think through the arguments again, as he did on 1 April in 1533 when, so Conrad Cordatus told in his ‘Table Talk’, Luther spent most of the day re-reading Erasmus’s prefaces to the New Testament. Luther found them pernicious: ‘He obscures the authority of Paul and John.’ But he went on puzzling about it. In 1537 Lauterbach said:

Elector John died in 1533 and was succeeded by his son John Frederick, educated by Spalatin, deeply devoted since adolescence to Luther. The Pope died the following year. The choice fell again on a man from one of the wealthy Italian families, the Farnese this time, and an old man too. But Paul III immediately applied himself seriously to the task of calling a Council, which Clement VII had continually postponed. He summoned it to Mantua, failing to grasp the extent to which this choice of a city in Italian speaking lands could not be acceptable to the Germans. He sent off an ambassador, Vergerio, round Europe to prepare the way. Luther wrote to Jonas on 10 November 1585:

Suddenly out of the blue the Legate of the Roman Pope visited this town as well. Now he is with the Margrave. This man seems to fly rather than ride. How I wished you had been here! The legate invited me and Pomer for breakfast, since I had declined an evening meal on account of having a bath. I went and ate with him up at the castle. But I am not allowed to write to anyone about what I said. During the whole meal I played the proper Luther.

Vergerio was surprised to see Luther, looking so young at fifty-two, and remarks were made on both sides about preparations made at the barber’s to present himself as still lively. Luther went the short distance up the street to the castle by coach with Bugenhagen, and dressed not in academicals but in his best Renaissance hose, short coat and fur. The Legate had to listen to Luther telling him that a Council was indeed necessary for the papists but that the evangelicals did not need one as they were already reformed. Vergerio was, on the whole, agreeably surprised by Luther, with the quiet timbre of his voice, though he found the eyes trying. Years later he became a Protestant himself.

Luther was increasingly often ill. He had phlebitis in the leg, and a vein had been opened, so that he could bleed himself at will. He felt ill most mornings, and suffered increasingly from the vertigo which had begun ten years previously. The fantasy of death began to take on more credible and personal characteristics. Luther grew more philosophical about it, joking more gently and less melodramatically about himself as too old. To Caspar Muller in January 1536, he wrote: ‘I too am sick with cough and catarrh. But my worst affliction is that the sun has shone on me for a long time, a vexation which, as you well know, is common, and certainly many people die of it!’ He apologised for not taking a particular student into the household as boarder, there was no room left. Then he spoke of the lately dead Katherine of Aragon: ‘We poor beggars, the theologians in Wittenberg, are the only exceptions who would like to maintain her in royal honour. . . Tell my brother that my cough and his silence kept me from answering him! Give my greetings to his black hen . . .’ After a further reference to the tiresome shining of the sun, he continued: ‘I am quite rough and coarse, large, grey, green, overburdened . . . sometimes in order to survive I have to force myself to make a joke . . . Greet all good gentlemen and friends. 19 January 1536. Doctor Martin Luther.’

The Schmalkaldic League determined to meet at Schmalkalden in a full session to work out its response to Pope Paul III’s summoning of a Council. Although ill with heart trouble, stones and frequent dizziness, Luther worked out a first draft of Articles for the Conference. On the way there, early in 1537, it was Jonas not Luther who was taken ill and had to be left behind at Torgau. When he reached Altenberg, Luther wrote him a cheering letter with the latest information and hopes for his recovery, and a request that Jonas, who was to return to Wittenberg, should greet his family ‘and also the Pomeranian Rome and his little Quirites’, the little Bugenhagens. Luther and all of them were being very well entertained; they were playing a game of verses, and Luther sent his attempt with his letter: ‘Master Philip, that is Homer, sends his too. 1 February, at Altenberg, at 8.00 p.m. Yours, Martin Luther, Doctor.’

But then, at Schmalkalden, it was Luther’s turn. He had trouble passing water. By the end of February he was in great trouble, but finally he had relief and wrote to his wife the next day: ‘Not one little drop of water passed from me; I had no rest nor did I sleep, and I was unable to retain any food or drink. In summary I was dead; I commended you, together with the little ones, to God and to my gracious Lord, since I thought I would never again see you in this mortal life. . . But soon several litres passed from me, and I feel as if I were born again.’ He gave her directions about renting some horses. Then there was a further relapse. Luther made a confession of his sins to Bugenhagen, received absolution and prepared himself for death. However, eventually he passed six stones. He then began to get better but the convalescence was lengthy.

Back at home on 21 March, Luther wrote to Spalatin: ‘By God’s grace I gradually recuperate and learn to eat and drink again. Yet my thighs, knees and bones are still shaky and are unable so far to carry my body. . . My Katie is sorry she brought nothing in the line of a present for your daughters . . . She raves about your thoughtfulness and your great kindness.

From now on, Luther was an old man. In the seven years since Augsburg, he had become an institution. The river of reform was in full flood, destroying as it went and providing water for new growth. Luther could not control it, and he was no longer by any means the only reformer of stature. Men of the hour burgeoned in every country. Tyndale’s English Bible and Calvin’s great systematic theology were the new wonders. But Luther was revered everywhere as the principal and original begetter. His own complete Bible translation had finally been published in 1534. But the great thing was that he had done what had been thought to be impossible. He had survived as a heretic and had provided a re-presentation of Christianity which more and more people began to see to be right. He was a nuisance to himself and to his friends, and sometimes made his own insights difficult to grasp, making them seem, with his bombast, less convincing than they truly were. But, briefly, who could really believe in a God whose love was full of threats and sly reckoning? Man was made for better things. He was made for faith in the incomprehensible but all loving God, seen and embraced in his Word.

‘To my dearest Katherine Luther, mistress of the house, . . ., Wittenberg: Personal. Grace and peace in Christ! Dear Katie. . .I have received all your letters . . . I got the picture of Lenchen (Magdalen). At first I didn’t recognise the little minx, she looked so dark. I think it would be all right if you stopped breast feeding, gradually, so that at first you leave out one feed a day, then two, until finally it stops completely.’ Luther said he got this advice from a friend who called recently, and went on: "Tell Mr Christian that in all my life I haven’t seen worse glasses than those which arrived with his letter. I couldn’t see a thing through them . . .The Emperor still delays at Innsbruck, the priests are conspiring and there is foul play. . . The messenger won’t wait longer. Greetings, kisses, hugs and regards to all and everyone as fits. 5 June in the morning, 1530, Martin Luther.’

The letters poured forth from Luther, once again the frustrated ‘General’ at the Castle — frustrated by his distance from events. He commonly added a letter to Katie to each batch of his other letters, while the messenger waited. The Emperor finally arrived at Augsburg in the fourth week in June. Letters and memoranda flew to and fro between Luther and the Elector, Melancthon, Spalatin and Justus Jonas. It was a time of jockeying for position. The Emperor’s previous official visit to Germany nine years earlier had ended in the outlawing of Luther; now he seemed to be inviting Luther’s associates to present their case.

Melancthon was busy with negotiations, re-casting his ever newly polished commonplaces, turning them now into an Apology’ and finally into a ‘Confession’ to be presented to the Emperor. On 15 May, Luther received a copy from the Elector for his comment. He sent it back the same day by return messenger as requested: ‘I have read through Master Philip’s Apologia which pleases me very much; I know of nothing which needs to be corrected or changed, nor would this be appropriate since I cannot step so softly and gently.’ Melancthon’s style he knew well, and he had seen the great majority of the sentences themselves in one form or another, in previous documents. But was it really feasible to do business with the papists? That was what worried Luther. He had already prepared his own text for Augsburg and it was even now printing at Wittenberg.

As soon as he had settled in at the Coburg he began to write a piece for the clerics and theologians assembling for the Imperial Diet. In letters to friends he told of a literary programme he had set himself for the duration of his stay: he would work on the Prophets, stemming from the still continuing work of translating the whole Old Testament, he would do commentaries on some of his favourite Psalms, and he would work on Aesop — this would fulfil a long cherished ambition to bring out an edition of Aesop’s fables, which he eventually did. The jackdaws in the trees outside had set his mind off again in that direction. He spun tales to his correspondents about their bird Diet, and their war on the crops. But the first ten days were very largely occupied with his Exhortation to all Clergy assembled at Augsburg. He had soon completed twenty thousand words and sent it off to Wittenberg for printing.

It was a rumbustious farrago, mixing his usual bombast with sharp insights and practical proposals. In the opening sections he laughed at the way in which the theme of faith and works had now been taken up so widely by all preachers — ‘they slyly leave their sermon book under the bench and whatever else the shouting in the pulpit used to be about, and they begin to preach to us again on faith and good works, about which one never used to hear or know anything’. Yet, he complained, nothing much else seemed to have changed — if they did not learn their lesson, another Muntzer would arise, and more violence supervene. Then he turned to the accustomed list of items in the Catholic tradition which he had been denouncing in the last ten years, that remained largely unreformed: Indulgences and special confessional arrangements, the ‘sale of Masses’, private Masses, and the teaching that Mass was a sacrifice and a good work, the Ban, the faithful confined to one kind at Communion, celibate priests — on the latter he was his usual eloquent self and included a reference to the fact that the Pope, Clement VII, had been born out of wedlock, and another reference to the mistresses of Cardinal Albrecht.

Then he came to a series of ‘Offers’ to the Church authorities: (1) ‘Allow us to teach the Gospel freely. . . Do not persecute and resist that which you cannot do and are all the same supposed to do and which others want to do for you. . . (2) Luther and his followers would continue to work without any expectation of payment from the established Church authorities. (3) Bishops and priests should be allowed to remain in possession of their property and to be recognised as ‘princes and lords.’ He summed up as a fourth point: ‘You could restore the episcopal jurisdiction again, as long as you left us free to preach the Gospel. For my part, I will readily give help and counsel so that you may have something of the episcopal office after all.’ Luther was granting favours, not soliciting them.

This was as far as he was ever to go in compromise, and he was reluctant and worried at the prospect of agreement. Melancthon was busy all his life trying to patch a detailed doctrinal agreement together. But Luther felt he could never really trust the ecclesiastical authorities. And he was concerned about the practicalities of what was being talked about. The Christian faith was expressed in human terms, earthen vessels, in public worship, in gestures, words and music, and these were important. Luther claimed with some justification that the reformers celebrated the liturgy with greater reverence than the papal Church; Mass at Wittenberg still looked Catholic in many ways. The ‘Host’, the consecrated bread was still ‘elevated’, lifted up for all to see — other reformers had omitted this for some years. Luther was always trying to stretch beyond mere rites, to the liturgical expression of the Gospel, to an occasion for the recognition of Christ and his message. In his youth he felt irretrievably hampered by the Church’s insistence that to offer Mass was to do something ‘meritorious’. But eucharistic worship remained central to his theology. He wanted it to be a free act of worship and thanksgiving.

In his text for Augsburg, Luther went on to a great list of actions, gestures and symbols, which he found either unacceptable, or only acceptable as a kind of cultural decoration, or possibly welcome but not to be imposed — the Freedom of the Word was the great thing. And yet he was increasingly aware of what he considered abuse of that freedom by preachers who ignored all tradition and relied on a purely personal spiritual understanding of the New Testament. In all his writing at this time there was a reaching out to distinguish acceptable norms in the received tradition, and a wish not to discard what had assisted faith. While at the Coburg he wrote a long ‘pastoral’ text on the Eucharist, encouraging Christians to go frequently to communion. First in his Augsburg list comes a list of thirty-seven unacceptable things: (1) Indulgences . . . (10) Masses at Four Weeks. (11) Soul baths. (12) Venerations of Saints some of whom were never born. . . (14) Mary made a common idol with countless services. (15) Butter letters. (16) Countless relics, with fraud . . . (29) Sacrament of Marriage. (30) Sacrament of priesthood. (31) Sacrament of Confirmation.

Then comes a list of lesser things ‘beyond necessity, purely as a special service to God, which is contrary to faith. . . Tonsures, chasubles, albs. . . altar cloths, lights. . . bells, holy water, holy salt, incense’, and a further list of ambivalent things: ‘veiling of statues, keeping fasts (except for the clergy), Litany of the Saints, Hymns to Mary of an evening, Confession torture, Palm swallowing, Passion sermons eight hours long, Consecrating the fire, . . . St Martin’s Goose. . . three Christmas Masses, Oats on St Stephen’s Day, St. John’s draught’. These were by no means all bad in themselves, but should not be imposed.

Some of these have declined which I did not want to see decline, but which can easily come back again. Among them the very best to remain are the fine Latin songs, for particular seasons, although they have been almost drowned out by the new saint-songs . . . If these things had been left as child’s play for youth . . . as one must give children dolls, puppets, hobbyhorses, then they would confuse no conscience. But that we old fools march around in bishops’ hats and with clerical pageantry and take it not only seriously but as an article of faith, so that it must be a sin and must torment the conscience of anyone who does not venerate such child’s play — that is the devil himself.

Working long hours on the translation of the Old Testament and suffering from severe headache, exhaustion and depression, he could not summon up much comment for the messenger waiting to return to the Elector with Melancthon’s Apologia. He had written to Philip on 12 May: ‘I am suffering from a ringing, or rather thundering in my head — I nearly passed out.’ In spite of it, he punned: ‘My head (Caput) has become a Chapter (Capitulum} and will soon be a paragraph, and then a bare sentence . . . Satan so crushed me that I had to get out of my room and look for company.’ He was fortunate to have Veit Dietrich with him, and his nephew Cyriac Kaufman. Dietrich was a major help with preparing his texts. He was also beginning to collect a file of Luther’s passing comments, which would become the first of the famous series of ‘Table Talk’; and he wrote letters to Katie, telling her how her husband was.

Luther wrote to his son’s tutor, Jerome Weller, now living with the family, and suffering like Luther from depression.

And Luther laughed at advisers, medical and spiritual: ‘Whatever one does in the world is wrong. . . One physician advises me to bathe my feet at bedtime, another before dinner, a third in the morning, a fourth at noon . . . So it is in other things: if I speak I am thought turbulent, if I keep silence I am thought to spit on the cross. Then Mr Wiseacre comes along and hits the poor beast on the rump.’

The Elector was the first sovereign to arrive at Augsburg. He and his advisers waited for news of the Emperor, who had reached Innsbruck early in May and delayed there for lengthy consultation with advisers from Church and state. Campeggio was there, his mind still abuzz with the troubles of the Emperor’s aunt, Queen of England, now dismissed by Henry VIII who was threatening fearful things if the Pope did not give him a divorce. Delay was the best answer, play for time, when no solution could be seen. Campeggio advised the Emperor to delay the Diet. He was worried that Charles was going to temporise with the Reformers, or to strengthen his political position and weaken the papacy again. Luther’s old debating partner was also there, Johann Eck, with a list of 404 reasons why the Reformers were heretics. Eck had been working hard at pastoral work in several parishes around Ingolstadt, and had become a devoted Reformer within the established Church — he had always granted Luther’s thesis against Indulgences, but reform should keep within the bounds of established canonical and papal norms. He had written numerous Latin works and had engaged with Zwingli in a disputation in Switzerland.

To encourage Elector John and his theologians Luther sent encouraging letters to Augsburg, including one strongly supportive to the Elector, assuring him that time was not heavy on his hands as the Elector had feared it might be (what might not happen if Luther were bored ?), and that they were comfortable and well fed at the Coburg. He recalled the solid achievements which were now to be seen in Ernestine Saxony, the results of the Visitation, of the preaching of a theology of faith and the circulation of the Little Catechism, and the German New Testament: ‘The young people, both boys and girls, grow up so well instructed in the Catechism and the Scriptures that I am deeply moved when I see that young boys and girls can pray, believe, and speak more of God and Christ than they ever could in the monasteries, foundations, and schools of bygone days, or even of our day. Truly your Elector Grace’s territory is a beautiful paradise . . .’ On the same day that he wrote to the Elector, he wrote a second German letter to Landgrave Philip to keep him on the correct doctrinal lines in the coming Diet — the letter ended with Luther’s byline ‘From the Wilderness’.

At the end of May, copies of his Exhortation to the Clergy at Augsburg arrived at the Coburg; by 2 June they were selling fast at Augsburg itself. On 5 June, after the messenger had left for Wittenberg with his letter, including the one for Katie, another messenger arrived with sad news. His father had died. Luther had been writing a letter to Melancthon and now added: ‘We die many times before we die once for all. I succeed now in the legacy of the name, and I am almost the oldest Luther in my family. . . Since I am now too sad, I am writing no more; for it is right and God-pleasing for me, as a son, to mourn such a father. . .’ For twenty-four hours, all his emotions were turned to this personal grief. It was the end of an epoch for Luther. Standing apart from affairs at the Coburg, he digested it easily. A long day and night’s sorrow and he was through with it. Death had always been a central theme; now it became more familiar still. Two weeks later, Veit Dietrich wrote to Katie to describe how he took it. The news had come in a letter from Hans Reinecke (Luther’s boyhood friend with whom he travelled to his first boarding school at Magdeburg):

Looking at Reinecke’s letter he says to me: ‘So my father is dead!’ Then he hurriedly took his Psalter, went into his room, and wept so much that the next day he had a headache. Since that time he has not betrayed any further emotion . . . You did something very good when you sent the picture of Magdalen to Doctor Luther, for the picture helps him to forget many troubling thoughts. He has pinned it upon a wall opposite the table in the room where we eat.

That was a letter dated 19 June. On the same date, Luther wrote again to Jerome Weller, and he wrote also to four-year-old Hans himself: ‘I am pleased to hear that you are doing well in your lessons, and that you are praying well. Go on like this, my son, and when I return home I shall bring you a nice present from the fair.’ It was a relief to turn aside from an argument he was having with Melancthon and Spalatin, who seemed to be keeping him short of information and made him fear the worst. He sent Hans a story of a garden full of things gold and silver, little coats, ponies, saddles, reins, apples, pears, cherries, yellow and blue plums, with many children playing in it. He had asked the owner if his own child might join in and ‘eat such fine apples and pears, and ride on these pretty ponies and play with these children’, and the reply was yes, ‘if he too likes to pray, study and be good, he too may enter the garden, and also Lippius [Melancthon] and Jost [Jonas]. They would get ‘whistles, drums, lutes and would dance and shoot with little crossbows; and Aunt Lena could go too.’ Luther’s fantasies were not all honor, anger and despair. ‘Works’ and rewards were also apparently acceptable for four-year-olds.

At Augsburg the atmosphere grew more tense and the jockeying more active as the Emperor arrived at Munich and then started out on the final leg for Augsburg. Rulers and representatives from five states and two towns, also two princes had been persuaded by Elector John to sign the now very long text of Melancthon’s Confession. It was in two distinct parts. In the first part, the essentials of the Christian religion were set down in a way which it was hoped all at the Diet would agree to; the second part referred to matters in dispute. Justification by faith was treated moderately in the first part; Melancthon presented it in a way that did not necessarily contradict traditional Catholic teaching — even though it put sacramental practice into a less ‘legal’ and obligatory context. The headings of the matters in dispute were: on both kinds in communion; the marriage of priests; the Mass; Confession (both these last two were also listed under matters in agreement); Fasts and pious Conventions; monastic vows; the authority of the Church. It was a text that had been long in the making, well thought out and carefully constructed: so much so that it became the confessional document of the subsequent ‘Lutheran Church’, and was still being discussed in detail on its recent 450th anniversary.

Meanwhile, Luther was ill and in an increasing state of emotional turmoil. What was going on at Augsburg? Nobody sent him any news; there must be dirty work. He wrote angrily like a sulky child and said he would not write to them if they did not write to him.

Eventually a packet of letters arrived, together with the latest text of the Confession. The Emperor had entered Augsburg on the eve of Corpus Christi, 15 June, and had immediately summoned those rulers who had signed the Protest at Speyer, and ordered their preachers to cease public preaching in the imperial town. But this was not acceptable to the ‘Protestants’. Eventually, it was agreed that neither reformed preachers nor papal preachers should give sermons; the Emperor would appoint the preachers at his own public worship. It was a bad start. The Elector was annoyed. but there was some sympathy for the withdrawn and still youthful looking Emperor. ‘The Emperor greets Elector John in quite a friendly way and I wish our party would be more courteous,’ wrote the sensitive Philip Melancthon to Luther. The letters began to flow again from the Coburg, with extended explanations about the rights and wrongs of the long ‘silence’, together with emphatic abjurations from Luther that there was to be no retreat by the Reformers: ‘For me more than enough has been conceded in this Apologia [now the Confession]. . . Day and night I am occupied with this matter, considering it, turning it round, debating it and searching the whole Scripture.’ His desperation of mind and body were poured out: ‘It seems that that demon, which till now has beaten me with fists, has given up as if broken by your prayers) . . . instead another one has followed which will wear down my body . . . I would rather tolerate this torture of the flesh than that executioner of the spirit.’ And the devil ‘will have no peace until he has gobbled me up. All right, if he eats me, he shall eat a laxative (God willing) which will make his bowels and his anus too tight for him.’

Melancthon spoke in a letter to Luther of how he followed Luther’s originating authority. But Luther objected in a pernickety and prickly, academic way, that if his name was going to be used he would handle the matter by himself. Melancthon was trying to give credit where due. The opportunity with which he was now presented could hardly have been greater. Luther was gripped with frustration at the lack of verve and the absence of imaginative criticism in Melancthon’s text. He could not leave Philip alone. ‘The outcome of this case tortures you because you cannot comprehend it. But if you could comprehend it, then I would not wish to be a partner in this cause, much less its originator. God has placed this case into a certain paragraph which you don’t have in your rhetoric, nor in your philosophy. This is entitled "Faith" . . .’ and on Luther went, line after line of rhetoric to teach Melancthon once again about faith and the incomprehensible nature of God. ‘I wish an opportunity would present itself to me to come to you. . . God’s grace be with you and with you all. Amen.’ And then a PS — he had not replied properly about the details of what they should be willing to concede: ‘I am willing to concede all things if only the Gospel alone is permitted to remain free with us. What is contrary to the Gospel, however, I cannot concede. What else should I answer?’

Then news came that the Confession had been read to the Emperor in an official assembly of the Diet, not exactly a plenary assembly, but two hundred were present in the Emperor’s chapel. Campeggio was beside himself at this outrage. For the Reformers it was a milestone. A formal reading of their credal statement at an Imperial Diet. On hearing about it, Luther relented. To Conrad Cordatus and Nicholas Hausmann he wrote triumphant letters on 6 July: ‘I am tremendously pleased to have lived to this moment when Christ has been publicly proclaimed by his staunch confessors in such a great assembly by means of this really most beautiful confession’, and ‘Our confession (which our Philip prepared) has been, publicly read by Dr Christian [Beyer, Saxon Chancellor], right in the palace of the Emperor . . .There is no one in this whole Diet whom our friends praise more highly for his peacefulness than the Emperor himself. . . all are filled with affection and applause. . .’ He had heard from Jonas that he had studied the Emperor’s face during the reading of the Confession and there was a certain humanitas in it. To Melancthon himself, two days earlier before he had heard the great news, although grumbling about some of it, Luther had written: ‘Yesterday I re-read your whole Apologia, and I am tremendously pleased with it.’

But what was to be the result of the reading? Luther continued to worry that no good would come of it and his own desk was littered with texts of further pamphlets criticising the un-reformed Church. He was anxious about the absence in the Confession of sufficient criticism, and he was worried that unacceptable concessions would be made to the papal representatives, impressed by Melancthon’s text and wishing to end disunity. Cardinal Cajetan, still a power in Rome, had always assented, like Eck, to much of the criticism of Indulgences and of corruption. He was not alone in the Roman Curia, or among churchmen generally, in this stance.

Some of the bishops and papal representatives at the Diet were impressed by Melancthon’s piece, and assented to the reasonableness of the demands for Communion under both kinds and for the abandonment of clerical celibacy. But they were few and were unable to force discussion of the real issues, as distinct from negotiations on a political basis. In the end they had to choose between the Freedom of the new movements and the canonical Tradition embodied in Rome. The theological and disciplinary matters at issue were never argued out. The momentum, ideological, political and economic of the papal Church, and increasingly now of the new Protestant movements dominated the scene. The result was polarisation of the two positions and the rapid institutionalisation of ‘Protestantism’. In the twentieth century the two positions, roughly of the ‘Gospel’ and of the ‘Church’, have been partially reconciled within the Church of England and other reformed Churches. At the extremes the papal Church itself has still not entirely shed the mantle of imperial Rome; and the Gospel fundamentalists and evangelicals still sometimes lack ascertainable norms, and appropriate symbolic and sacramental channels of communication. Both extremes find spiritual authority difficult to handle, tending to lapse either into authoritarianism or indifference. Until 1530 these contradictions and difficulties had been kept either out of sight or under repression for a very long time. They now broke out uncontrollably. The will to reconciliation was lacking in the majority on both sides, in spite of a minority which worked hard for it.

‘Let your Majesty be well advised . . . not to promise or concede to them anything whatever, because you would then enter a labyrinth from which you could never emerge any more, and so they would have gained their will. But. . . extirpate these heresies, proceeding against them with order and system, . . . using, you your temporal arms and I the spiritual, and thus zealously punish them as is right. . . and show yourself the true and undoubted successor of Charlemagne amongst whose other greatest undertakings there still resounds the fame of the conquest he made of the Saxons. . .’ Campeggio replied in this way before the Emperor at the session following that at which Melancthon’s text had been read. Although he did request a theological examination of Melancthon’s text, it was perfectly clear that Campeggio intended a mere formal refutation of it. No genuine examination was intended of the Reformer’s careful survey of theology and Church conventions. Campeggio was sure it was essentially ‘heretical’. The substantive theological issues were in fact treated as a function of the great ecclesiastical Structure — or to put to it as its defenders essentially understood it: the papal Church had an absolute right and duty to suppress all fundamental criticism of its own divinely instituted authority. Any radical questioning of current theological and disciplinary norms clearly implied such criticism.

The Emperor agreed. But, at least he argued with the Pope and his representatives, they should call a Council to settle these matters formally. They should call one, also because the German nation had for so long been demanding such a ‘Free Council’ to right all the grievances under which it laboured. In any case, it was the only possible way to solve the disagreements. He was unable to impose a solution because, he said, in a letter to the Pope: ‘The Protestants are more unyielding and more obstinate than ever — while the Catholics are generally lukewarm and but little inclined to lend a hand in the forcible conversion of those who have fallen away . . . the welfare of Christendom absolutely requires a Council.’ The Emperor requested a designated place and date for it, concluding that he ‘submitted in advance to the decision of the Vicar of Christ’. It was to be fifteen years before the Council was to open at Trent under Pope Clement VII’s successor. Clement himself was terrified at the prospect and always intended to avoid calling a Council. It might undermine the authority of the Pope.

The meetings at Augsburg multiplied over the following two and a half months The Electors, their deputies the theologians, the Emperor’s men, the Roman Curia’s men, the ambassadors and assistants from all over Europe met in small groups and big groups. The Reformers had their own sub-plot. Neither the Swiss reformers inspired by Zwingli, nor Strassburg (together with Constance, Memmingen and Lindau) agreed with all of Melancthon’s text. The latter four cities sent in their own version (Confessio Tetrapolitana) of the true understanding of the Gospel. To the horror of the curialists the Emperor allowed even this to be read out half officially in a committee though he had previously declined the statement of Zwingli’s group Negotiations took place. Melancthon gave a little. The papal group appeared, after all, to be willing to talk. But the Emperor always intended the conversion of the Protestants, if necessary by force. And the papal party always wanted their bishops and it was never likely that they could be conscientiously obeyed by the Reformers. But for six or seven weeks the discussions flowed. To Luther’s intense concern substantial ground was conceded at one stage by both sides. On 15 July, Luther wrote a joint letter to Jonas, Spalatin, Melancthon and Agricola: ‘You will have to hear "fathers, fathers, fathers, church, church, church, usage, custom". Moreover you will hear nothing taken from Scripture . Based on these norms the Emperor will pronounce a verdict against you . . . Our case has been made and beyond this you will not accomplish anything better. To Campeggio’s boasts that he has the power to grant dispensations I reply with Amsdorf’s words: "I shit on the legate and his lord’s dispensations" . Home, home! Gruboc [Coburg — backwards]. 15 July. Martin Luther. D.’

The Emperor eventually gave his official assent to the official Confutation of Melancthon’s text, refusing to accept replies to it. On 22 September he issued an imperial Edict at a plenary meeting. It demanded that the Reforming sovereigns (the ‘Protestants’ as the Emperor called them elsewhere — the ‘protesters’ at Speyer) conform with traditional norms (reference was made to sancta fide et religione Christiana — Ecclesia Chtristiana) giving a deadline of six months. The implication was that thereafter the Reforming sovereigns would be legally out of order and might be proceeded against if they had not conformed. An attempt to take the sting out of this was made by referring to the summoning of a Council which the Emperor would request from the Pope to remove abuses and other burdens. The Reforming sovereigns were also to assist the Emperor in ‘coercing’ and ‘punishing’ the Anabaptists, which seemed to mean roughly all the Reformers to the left of Luther.

The Edict was clearly unacceptable to the Reformers. The Elector obtained dismissal papers and left abruptly the following day. His son (and designated successor) young Duke John Frederick had left ten days previously without a final audience with the Emperor. There was now a kind of stalemate, but a dangerous one. The Turks were no longer threatening in the east. The Emperor had made a political treaty with the Pope. He was free then to raise an army in Europe should he decide to try to impose his will. Some of the pro-papal German sovereigns at Augsburg immediately formed an alliance with the Emperor to defend the Empire and the faith. Discussion of this serious international situation by the Elector and his advisers began immediately and culminated in a conference at the electoral court at Torgau, as soon as they arrived back.

The flow of letters to and from the Coburg had continued unabated. Messengers going north were given notes to Katie— ‘My dear Katie: This messenger called here in haste. . . I have not had any throbbing in my head since St Lawrence day’ (10 August). Again: ‘To my dear lord, Frau Katherine Luther at Wittenberg Personal . . . Greet Aunt Lehne . . . Here we are eating bunches of ripe grapes even though outside it has been very wet this month. God be with you all. Amen. >From the wilderness, 15 August 1530 Martin Luther.’

Luther was also writing a commentary on Psalm 118 and his mind kept turning to the plain chant as it had gone from side to side of the choir in the old days. The music went on round his mind, and he chalked up the Psalm with its melody on the walls. Then he found another theme from the evening office, using Psalm 4, ‘In peace I will lie down and sleep’, and it spoke to him of a welcome end to life, which might perhaps come sooner rather than later. Disillusion, ill-health and great weariness beckoned to death. Luther’s fantasy was no longer of a death at the hands of the State, instructed by the Church, but of a natural death. Instead of the ideas about life being better in his own little corner in the Friary, now it was a looking forward to release from all the public palaver and problems. And the music kept running in his head. From the Coburg he wrote to Louis Senfl, chief conductor and composer at the Bavarian court, to send him a copy of that musical text: ‘In peace I will lie down and sleep. . .’ For this tenor melody has delighted me from youth on, and does so even more now that I ‘understand’ the words. I have never seen the antiphon arranged for more voices. I do not wish, however, to impose on you the work of arranging; rather I assume that you may have available an arrangement from some other source. Indeed I hope that the end of my life is at hand; the world hates me and cannot bear me, and I, in turn, loathe and detest the world; therefore may the best and most faithful shepherd take my soul to him. Forgive my temerity and verbosity. Extend respectful greetings to your whole choir on my behalf.

On 24 September, Luther wrote to his wife that he hoped to be home in fourteen days’ time. It took longer. The Electoral party arrived from Augsburg in no great hurry, on 1 October. They all reached Torgau and the Electoral court by the last week in October. There they held a brief conference on international affairs. Should the Emperor bring military force to bear on the Reforming States, the lawyers had thought up arguments to persuade Luther to sanction military defence. The political bind turned tighter still. It was put to him that armed resistance to the Emperor would be right if the Emperor were to disregard his own imperial laws. Luther put down his distressing conclusions in his long post-Augsburg piece, ‘Warning to his Dear German People by Martin Luther’. By the end of the month during the Conference at Torgau, he was able to reply succinctly to the hypothesis put to him. Theoretically his position was unchanged — one should always obey the secular law. Practically, however, his position was transformed. Ex-Chancellor Bruck had persuaded him that it was part of the secular law that one might resist the imperial authority in some circumstances.

A piece of paper has been presented to us from which we see what the Doctors of Law are concluding with regard to the question: In what situations may one resist governing authority? If then this issue has been settled by these Doctors of Law or experts in this way, and we certainly are in those situations in which one may resist the governing authority. . .we are unable to oppose . . . if in this instance it is necessary to fight back, even if the Emperor himself attacks, or whoever else may do so in his name. . . That until now we have taught absolutely not to resist the governing authority was due to the fact that we did not know that the governing authority’s law itself grants the right to do so; we have of course always diligently taught that this law must be obeyed.

It was a kind of surrender for Luther. No longer could he commend the idealistic and Christ-like non-violence which he had preached to the peasants, and to everyone who wanted to oppose the Emperor. The theory had not changed — one should obey the laws, in the kingdom of this world one had to submit to its ways. But practically it was a volte-face. The text of his ‘Warning’ to the German people mirrored the anguish. Justus Jonas in a letter to him from Augsburg had referred to Luther as ‘the German prophet’. The ascription pleased Luther, and made this text easier to do. But its inner contradictions were clear on the surface. The situation had become unthinkable. Loyalty to the young Emperor had been part of an almost romantic idealisation of him:

‘One of two things will happen: either a war or a rebellion. . .we are speaking now as in a dream’ — a dream, because never had Luther thought of himself as an enabler, even less a promoter of rebellion. It was a new identity and the dream more like a nightmare. But his prophetic task could not be evaded, and what he had to say was honest enough: ‘They [the Emperor’s supporters] cannot take it for granted that no one will attack them just because we [Luther] wrote and taught so emphatically not to resort to rebellion . . .’ He began to speak with a radical ambivalence, and what he said could be interpreted variously: ‘If now the masses should reject our teaching against rebellion, especially if they were provoked by such a godless outrage and wanton war . . .’ then his message was that he could not hold them back, that his teaching against rebellion would not be so emphatically promulgated as before, and that people should not accept any order to join the Emperor’s army since such an army would he fighting directly against the things of God. He remembered the Peasants’ War: ‘I will surely hold my pen in check and keep silent and not intervene as I did in the last uprising. I will let matters take their course even though not a bishop, priest or monk survives and I myself also die.’ But this writing itself was a kind of ‘intervention’ before it all happened, an intervention in the other direction: ‘I will not reprove those who defend themselves . . . I will accept their action and let it pass as self-defence . . . Not that I wish to incite anyone on to such self-defence, or to justify it’. Ambivalence hung over the text.

Then he went on to outline the outrageous happenings at Augsburg, and to indulge in the kind of language the delicate Melancthon so detested: ‘They thought that when they brought the Emperor in person to Germany, all would be frightened and say "Gracious Lords, what is your wish?" When they proved mistaken and the Elector of Saxony was the very first to make his appearance, my heavens, they dirtied their breeches in their terror.’ Then his text turned to his old opponent Johann Eck: ‘Dr Eck . .. declared openly within the hearing of our people that if the Emperor had followed the resolution arrived at in Bologna and attacked the Lutherans with the sword. . . then the problem would have been solved. Many of our opponents were astonished when our Confession was read and admitted that it was the simple truth and could not be refuted by Scripture. On the other hand, when their confutation was read, they hung their heads and admitted with their expressions that it was a flimsy and empty thing compared with our confession.’ But, in fact, said Luther, it was not a confutation — ‘Their well-grounded confutation has not yet been brought to light. It is perhaps still slumbering with old Tannhauser in the Venusberg’, the legendary mountain of sensual delight. Later in the piece, Luther let fly about the debauchery in Rome and set down some of the more unsavoury pieces of gossip. If people took up arms for the Emperor, they would be defending this kind of thing: ‘You would burden yourselves with the chastity of pope and cardinals . . . a special type of chastity transcending the common spiritual kind . . . about which they tested as though it were a game of cards. . . I am not lying. Whoever has been in Rome knows that conditions are unfortunately worse than anyone can say or believe by means of a Bull . . . they decided that a cardinal should not keep as many boys in the future. However, Pope Leo commanded that this be deleted; otherwise it would have been spread through the whole world how openly and shamelessly the Pope and the cardinals in Rome practise sodomy.

As well as listing their vices, including murdering and betraying each other, Luther turned once again to describing the well-known examples of their doctrinal errors: ‘They put that noble child Mary right into the place of Christ. They fashioned Christ into a judge and thus devised a tyrant for anguished consciences, so that all comfort and confidence was transferred from Christ to Mary, and then everyone turned from Christ to his particular Saint. Can anyone deny this? Are not books extant — specially those of the shabby Barefoot Friars and of the Preaching Friars — which teem with idolatries, such as the Marialia, Stellaria, Rosaria, Coronaria. These books of special devotions were indeed still in use, and remained so in many parts of the Roman Catholic Church until the present day.

He described how much better things were now. People ‘know how to believe, to live, to pray, to suffer, and to die’. If the Emperor’s troops came and turned things round again: ‘You will have to help burn all the German books, New Testaments, psalters, prayer books, hymnals, and to keep everyone ignorant about the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Creed . . . baptism, the sacrament, faith, government, matrimony, or the Gospel. You will have to help keep everyone from knowing Christian Liberty . . . from placing their trust in Christ and deriving comfort from him.’ For all of that was nonexistent. Luther spoilt his case here by exaggeration.

He wound up: ‘I swear again that I do not wish to incite or spur anyone to war or rebellion or even self-defence, but solely to peace. . . if the papists. . . insist on war. . . May their blood be on their heads!’

The Saxon prophet summed it up in a piece called The Keys (1530): ‘We know pretty well that the Romans do not consider us Germans to be human beings, but empty shells and shadows. . .they think that when a cardinal lets wind, the Germans believe a new article of faith is born.’ The official text of the Imperial Edict at Augsburg only reached Luther in the spring of 1531. He tore off a further blistering text which came out shortly after the ‘Warning’ It was entitled Commentary on the Alleged Imperial Edict. Near the end, he looked back to the Bohemian founder of the schismatic Church in the Czech lands, in an acceptance of a popular idea of Luther as the fulfilment of a prophecy: ‘St. John Huss prophesied of me when he wrote from his prison in Bohemia "They will roast a goose now (because ‘Huss’ means goose) but after a hundred years they will hear a swan sing and him they will endure." And that is the way it will be, if God wills.’

Luther was still university professor and local preacher, and more than ever virtually the master of Wittenberg. In many ways, however, it was a new world. The old Elector had died and in his place was a man, not young but at least able to attend to business expeditiously. He was already showing active signs of coping with requests about the University administration, though he had been irritated by Luther’s impatience. The civil war had ended and rebellion been put down. The general sense of threatening unrest had, for the moment, abated. Karlstadt had gone off on his travels; the reformers on the left, in Saxony and Thuringia, Luther’s ‘Schwarmerei’, were lying low. Luther was a respectable married man with a stable household, settled in the old Friary. There were regular meals and someone to rely on; Seeberger had stayed on to assist the new household. There was talk of Katie’s aunt, also an ex-nun, joining the household. Eventually she did, adding to the feeling of familial stability. Luther quickly adapted to marriage. At the personal level almost everything was better. Luther had a new lease of life.

Wittenberg itself had settled down. The reformed Mass, in German rather than Latin, Luther’s own text using adapted plain chant and folk modes and melodies, was inaugurated in Wittenberg in the autumn of 1525. And in spite of frequent news of fresh ‘wrong headed’ reforms arising in the west, some of the international news was good. Luther heard that the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, Albert of Hohenzollern, had declared himself Duke of Prussia and put through Lutheran reforms.

Society at large was in a low state and gave cause for concern both because of the results of war and plague and because of the loosening of the old religious bonds. It had become urgent to give people and priest some detailed idea of how to carry on. The Elector came to see Luther in Wittenberg about it; they worked out a detailed plan which the Elector took away with him. With this personal contact Luther had a greater sense of security than under his predecessor, the so-reticent ‘Wise’ elder brother of the Elector. He turned again to his desk and to Erasmus’s Discourse on Free Choice, which had lain unwontedly unanswered for more than a year.

Luther was well launched on the reply. For nine years he had been privately expressing his strong distaste for Erasmus’s theology. Now he was saying it publicly. How could the great scholar, whose Greek text of the New Testament had opened up the original words of the Word, be so superficial when it came to theology, indeed to a true understanding of the text?

The answer was not far to seek. For Erasmus, theology was a byword for hypocrisy and irrelevance and word spinning. In In Praise of Folly he had written, amongst other such sharp words: I myself once heard a great fool (a great scholar I would have said) undertaking in a laborious discourse to explain the mystery of the Holy Trinity. In unfolding it, in order to show his own cleverness and reading, and satisfy itching ears, he proceeded with a new method, expounding letters, syllables and proposition, the harmony of noun and verb, and that of noun substantive, and noun adjective . . . At last he . . . demonstrated the whole Trinity to be represented by these first rudiments of grammar, as clearly and plainly as it was possible for a mathematician to draw a triangle in the sand.’ Luther agreed with something of this caricature but wanted to put a right theology in its place. Erasmus wanted simply to get rid of theoretical theology as far as possible.

The original texts, first of the New Testament, then of the thinkers and leaders of the early Church, were what Erasmus wanted to present to the World. And he wanted the text of the Gospel to be put into the language of ordinary people. His was a world of sweet reasonableness. He envisaged the Church continuing much as it was in essentials, albeit thoroughly purged of all kinds of superstition and corruption, which he tried to outlaw with laughter. Christians should have the text of the New Testament and should try to live by it, with the help of the Church, its pastoral guidance and its sacraments. Theology could be left to the professionals — though from time to time others might need to keep an eye on them. Just such an occasion arose when a reformer began to talk of man’s entire lack of freedom of choice. Then Erasmus thought it was time to throw some common sense on the scene. The absurd doctrine seemed part and parcel of Luther’s extremism, and deserved to be exposed. He considered it was a clear theological and philosophical mistake, which would enable him to accede to the frequent requests of Luther’s enemies in high places, to controvert the extremist. He could do it without compromising over superstitions and corruption.

Luther was never very good at seeing the other man’s point of view when it came to matters of theology. With a man like Erasmus, the gap was unbridgeable. He could not stomach the quiet scholar’s qualifications nor his obeisance to Church authority. How typical of Erasmus it was, he suggested, to object to Luther making assertions: ‘You censure me for obstinate assertions . . . But it is not the mark of the Christian to take no delight in assertions . . . By assertion I mean a constant adhering, affirming, confessing, maintaining, and invincible persevering.’ Erasmus was prepared, with measured tolerance, to accept the Church’s doctrinal decisions, preferring not to argue about them. Here Luther got on to a central matter which lay between them: ‘Is it not enough to have submitted your personal feelings to the Scriptures? Do you submit them to the Church as well? What can she decree that is not decreed in the Scriptures?’ The use and style of authority in the Church, in the interpretation of the Gospel and management of its followers, were at issue. Erasmus wanted to keep both interpretation and management in a low key. Luther wanted the theology to be played loud. He was a medieval theologian. Theology should have a universal range if the discipline was to be meaningful at all. Theology was still the queen of the sciences. For Luther it had become almost synonymous in its style with interpretation of Scripture and preaching. It was concerned with the truth of the Word, of Christ to whom man owed total commitment. He still dreamed of a Church in which the authority of the Word would be self-operative and would not need anything like the kind of detailed organisation which had grown up in the Roman and papal Church in Europe. For Erasmus, theology was a rather tiresome professional necessity, tending towards blurring of fact, and often a threat to genuine scholarship, simple piety and good morals.

The quarrel was tragic in that Luther and Erasmus had a central goal in common. Erasmus said he wanted to hear the farmer singing the words of the New Testament in his own language as he worked. Luther said he wanted the Bible to speak good German, the real German of the housewife and the lad in the street. This drive to communicate what they both understood to be some kind of ultimate truth in the person and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, the man who showed forth God in his own person, was central to both their lives. They had in common the wish to see all members of the Church having free access in their own language to the great source document. But, from that point on, they differed nearly as widely as it was possible to do.

Erasmus understood that Luther was obsessed with the need for a true understanding of the Gospel and equally with the terrible corruption, functionalism and cynicism of so much of the personnel of the Church. Even after Luther’s scourging of him in this text, he continued to say that people should have listened to Luther and that while Luther had indulged in unacceptable violence, Rome deserved all it got. On the other hand, Luther was quite unable to understand the authenticity of the quiet though often acid scholar dedicated to a policy of neutrality, of attempting as far as possible to stand outside polarising polemic — Erasmus came eventually to wonder whether it might have been better not to have written In Praise of Folly, because it had led to just such polarisation.

Their subject was freedom and the quality of human acts, looked at sub specie aeternitatis; could a man take any step towards his own salvation by his own action? Or did he always need God’s grace, even to make that first gesture towards faith? The truth is, they were often speaking at different levels, Erasmus thinking of the mechanics in the mind, Luther looking at the nature of God as free, necessarily the ultimate author of good and at man’s ultimate dependence on God:

The publication at the end of 1525 of his On the Bound Will gave Luther yet another batch of ‘enemies’, and pushed him, in a sense, one step further away from being able to see some kind of general cleansing of the Church, in the way that he thought it must occur. To enemies on the left and enemies on the right he had now added enemies in the centre. His pathological obsession with enemies increased, and from now on Erasmus was sometimes referred to in terms that were absurdly inappropriate. ‘A slippery eel’ he may well have been. But to say of him, as Luther is reported to have done in the ‘Table Talk’, ‘in all his writings there is no statement anywhere about faith in Christ, about victory over sin’ was a calumny . In Erasmus’s most famous book the Enchiridion, precisely a book of advice about coping with temptation he had written, ‘Treat each battle as though it were your last, and you will finish in the end, victorious. It is possible that God might in the end reward you for your virtue by freeing you from your temptation.’

Erasmus eventually wrote a lengthy reply. In April 1526, he sent a letter, very pained at Luther’s violent and aggressive sneers: ‘How do your scurrilous charges that I am an atheist, and Epicurean and a sceptic help the argument? . . .It terribly pains me as it must all good men, that your arrogant, insolent, rebellions nature has set the world in arms’. Luther let it go. It was a final rupture and revealed the glaring weakness of Luther, when he gave himself up to his anger and to attitudes which to others seemed self-righteous, dogmatic and self-indulgent. But Luther found himself at the head of a vast movement, while Erasmus found himself shunting uncomfortably from town to town, from Louvain to Basel, to Freiburg to Basel, in search of tolerance for his quiet Catholic life style, not too welcome either to papists or reformers.

New editions of many of the major Fathers of the first centuries of the Church poured from Erasmus in his last twenty years (1516-36) Jerome, Athanasius, Basil, Cyprian, Irenaeus, Ambrose, Augustine, Hilary, Chrysostom, Origen, Gregory, Nazianzus. He remained faithful to the ideals he had spelt out in his introduction (the Paracelsus) to his Greek New Testament:

It was not far from what Luther sometimes said.

Odium Theologicum, genuine disagreement, resulting in enmity and even hatred, was liable to become as intense in theology as in any discipline; understandably, in that theology was concerned precisely with the definition of human life, the relation of man to the Divine. Theological models still provided the normal medium for most serious discussion of man and his destiny. Today a common model is economic or social — the quality of life as measured by social and political norms is what is most likely to lead to expressions of violent disagreement between people and groups. In the sixteenth century the Renaissance was beginning to provide an alternative model, but theology still predominated: ‘I am sending you, my Michael, my rebuttal of Erasmus, which I completed in a short time and in a hurry. I like your idea that the ruler of this word (Satan) is so powerful in obstructing any fruit of the World and in sowing sects of the ungodly’ (to Michael Stiffel, 31 December 1525). The world was a battlefield and the man of faith had no choice but to align himself. And Luther was able to praise Erasmus for one thing: ‘Unlike all the rest, you alone have attacked the real issues and have not wearied me with irrelevancies about the papacy, purgatory, indulgences and such trifles.’

The letters and memoranda poured out from Luther to the Elector about the University and about the parishes: ‘Your Electoral Grace should have all the parishes in the whole territory inspected.’ Ernestine Saxony should be divided into four or five districts; money should be raised locally to support the pastors. But the Elector did not feel so free to go ahead as Luther assumed. Although secular governments sometimes made supervisory visits to parishes, yet such a formal visitation would be in direct contravention of Canon Law, usurping the rights of the local Bishop. And the Elector was still deeply concerned with the problems of the external relations of his government.

Immediately after the end of the Peasants’ War he was approached by Duke George to line up with an anti-Reformist front. The absolute defeat of the peasants and the general idea of the discomfiture of Luther, led the Duke to suggest to the Elector and to young Philip of Hesse, who had married Duke George’s daughter, that they should stay in alliance with him and cap their victory over the peasants with a victory over the ecclesiastical revolutionaries. His blandishments had the opposite effect. The pro-Reform rulers, encouraged notably by the politically ambitious Philip banded together in the League of Torgau to present a united front at the Imperial Diet, which was to open in Speyer on 25 June 1526.

The international background to the new Diet was turgid. The previous year the Emperor had finally collected an army together, defeated the French at Pavia and taken the French King, Francis II, prisoner to Madrid where he was held until the Treaty of Madrid was signed. But the Treaty soon fell apart. Instead of supporting the Emperor against the Turks, Francis II began to intrigue with the Turks, with the political and military arm of Pope Clement VII, and finally also with reformist rulers in the German speaking lands. The Turks were to attack Spain by sea and go through Hungary into the Spanish territories in Italy. The Pope was keeping strange company. The result of this international circus was a very uncertain voice at the Diet in Germany, presided over by the Emperor’s brother Ferdinand, who attempted once again to get agreement to the formal execution of the decisions of the Diet of Worms. The Emperor and the Pope, who both wanted this, were in fact almost at war. And in any case the pragmatic, somewhat cynical and politically independent attitude of the majority of the members of the Diet remained unchanged. They were not in favour of formally supporting the reforms but neither did they wish to suppress them.

The two extreme parties both kept some initiative; and the result was a compromise. The Reformers were there in force with their preachers, and labelled their doorways VDMIE (Verbum Domini manet in eternum — the Word of the Lord shall remain forever). A famous compromise was agreed: ‘The Electors, Princes, Estates of the Empire and the ambassadors of the same . . .while awaiting the sitting of a Council or a national assembly, agreed. . . each one to live, govern, and carry himself as he hopes and trusts to answer for it to God and his Imperial Majesty.’ In other words there was to be no change.

News of a Turkish advance had hastened the decision which was agreed on 27 August 1526. Two days later the Turks won the battle of Mohacs, and on 10 September they swarmed into Budapest. The neutral decision of the Diet was regarded by the Emperor (occupied in Spain) as a mere stopgap while he saw to his other concerns, the Turks, his European political rivals (including the papacy as a political power), and his Spanish kingdom. He and his advisers looked to a future Council where the Church troubles would be sorted out. In fact, however, Speyer was the first step towards the ‘territorial church’, to a de facto arrangement by which each political unit settled its management of religion according to the decisions of its own rulers. Effectively, this was the first formal act of major political authority leading to the dismemberment of the univocal structure for the Church throughout Europe, other than the East. Luther woke at night to agonise over the terrifyingly large changes which were flowing from his actions. But the Diet itself he thought little of, seeing it largely as an occasion for the sovereigns to go carousing.

During the spring and summer months of 1526 Luther was much taken up with the affairs of his own household. He was ill from kidney stone. Katie was having their first baby. But the writing still flowed — a stirring criticism of a right wing anti-Reformist Ratschlag or Brief, issued by Cardinal Albrecht to the clergy of Mainz; and the usual lectures and sermons. The Bible translation continued. Luther kept worrying about the state of the parishes. Eventually, things began to move. The Diet of Speyer gave Elector John some kind of a legal basis for proceeding with the plans for the visitation of the parishes which Luther had recommended to him and for more formal claims on so much Church property. In the winter of 1526-7, they began to be put into effect. So the recommendations of Luther’s Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church were being realised; if the officials of the Myth, the Christian bishops and priests, would not themselves reform the Church then secular officials would do it, as Christians with the responsibility to act in society. Luther was concerned solely with the here and now. He would have been surprised to be told that he was founding an alternative Church, a state Church, with consequences for Centuries to come. He would have been equally surprised to know that Henry VIII of England, with whom he was having an angry exchange of letters, was laying the foundations of another non-papal state church. There was much writing and re-writing of the Instructions for the visitations, and Luther had to mediate when theological argument broke out between Agricola and Melancthon as to whether repentance came before faith, or vice versa. Reports from the parishes began to show an abysmal state of ignorance, in priest and people.

Luther had been in Wittenberg off and on for nineteen years now and knew its people, its paving stones and problems too well. When he was weary, he was very weary. When he thought about the decline in numbers at the University (Duke George had forbidden students living in Albertine Saxony to attend Wittenberg University), the rise of many reformers opposed to him, and so many other problems, it all seemed overwhelming. Illness threw him into new acute attacks of depression. He had fantasies of leaving Wittenberg. He had threatened to depart in his sermons on return from the Wartburg. Now he built a picture of himself earning a living at some practical work, somewhere else. Katie encouraged him to take an interest in gardening and joinery. He wrote in January 1527 to his old friend, the ex-friar Wenceslas Link, now a Reformed pastor in Nuremberg:

‘I wrote a suppliant and humble letter to the King of England. He has answered me with such hostility that he sounds just like Duke George. . . These tyrants have such weak, unmanly, and totally sordid characters that they deserve to be servants of the rabble . . . I appreciate that you promised to send seeds in the spring. Send as many as you can. . . I will turn my attention to the gardens, that is, to the blessings of the Creator, and enjoy them to his praise.’ He continued, a little apologetic and embarrassed by this turning to handwork (shades of Karlstadt on his farm): ‘Since among us barbarians there is neither art nor style of life, I and my servant Wolfgang [Seeberger] have taken up the art of operating a lathe. We are enclosing a gold guilder. . .be so kind as to send us some tools for boring and turnings and what lathe operators call a clamp — any lathe operator can easily tell you what this is . . . If the world should indeed not want to feed us on account of the Word that we preach, then we shall learn how to get our bread through the work of our hands.’ His friends smiled.

Luther found Seeberger not the best of assistants and ironically suggested to Link that he might find them some lathes which would work by themselves so that Seeberger could remain devoted to his beer. Luther had bought Seeberger a plot of his own, and wrote an amusing piece about his activities there, to give expression to his irritation with the man: ‘Complaint of the Birds to Luther against Wolfgang: We thrushes, blackbirds, finches, linnets, goldfinches and other pious birds . . . are credibly informed that one Wolfgang Seeberger, your servant, has conceived a great wicked plot against us . . . has bought, very dear, some old rotten nets to make a trap. . . pray restrain your servant or. . . at least make him spread corn. . . in the evening and not get up in the morning before eight. . . If not. . . we will pray God to plague him . . . and send frogs, grasshoppers, locusts and snails into the trap by day and to give him mice, fleas, lice and bugs . . . Written in our high home in the trees with our usual quill and seal.’

A few days after asking for the tools, a letter from Luther to Nicholas Hausmann provides another part of the current picture. ‘I have no other news except that the Sovereign has replied to the University that he wishes to speed the visitation of the parishes. . . Zechariah is now on the press, ready for publication.’ The Bible translation progressed. ‘At the same time I am attacking the Sacramentarians [those who thought that Sacraments depended for their validity on the faith of those who received them, and denied the Real Presence]. Please pray that Christ may guide my pen successfully and advantageously against Satan. . . I believe you have heard that the cause of the Emperor in Italy has developed successfully. The Pope is afflicted from all sides, so that he will be ruined. His end and his hour have come. But persecution rages everywhere and many are being burned at the stake.’

Again to Link, he wrote in May: ‘Zwingli has sent me a letter along with his most foolish booklet.’ The arguments with the left wing continued and Zwingli considered himself a moderate: ‘He raged, foamed, threatened and roared with such "moderation" that he seems to be incurable . . . May Christ grant that a healthy child has been born to you. Amen. My Katie has nausea again from a second pregnancy. . . All the seeds you sent us have sprung up; only the melons and gourds have not, although such plants are also sprouting — but only in other people’s gardens!’ The saga continued with a letter to Link on 5 July: ‘I congratulate you on the birth of your daughter Margaret . . . I looked forward to this with great eagerness so that you too might experience "the natural" affection of parents for their children . . . We received the tools for the lathe, together with quadrant and clock . . . Tell Nicholas Endrisch that he should feel free to ask me for copies of my books. . .Since I take nothing for my various works, I occasionally take a copy of a book if I want . . . The melons or pumpkins are growing and want to take up an immense amount of space; so do the gourds and water melons. So don’t think you sent the seeds in vain!’

One more letter to Lausanne in July rounds off the sequence. It starts with Luther making the decisive judgements in particular cases for which people no longer turned to the Church officials. Luther was becoming a substitute guardian and bishop: ‘If that man’s case is as he described it, my Nicholas, then I think he may lawfully keep his wife, since the former husband deserted her such a long time ago . . . The visitation has begun. Eight days ago, Dr Hero and Master Philip set out upon this work. . . Rome and the Pope have been terribly laid waste. Christ reigns in such a way that the Emperor who persecutes Luther for the Pope is forced to destroy the Pope for Luther . . . My Katie and little John send greetings. Farewell in Christ. I have had a severe fainting spell, so that even now my head prevents me from reading and writing.’

On 6 May, the Emperor’s army had got out of control, and submitted the city of Rome to an appalling sack, destroying, plundering, raping. The Pope took refuge in the St Angelo Castle by the Tiber, which remained impregnable. Luther sat back and watched his enemies apparently destroying each other — though it was not to be so for long. In any case, it was a time of deepening mental and physical depression for Luther. At the Frankfurt Spring Book Fair, his printers had sent along his full-length reply to numerous works of the other Reformers, Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Pirkheimer, Bucer, Capito and others, on the meaning of those words of Jesus at his Last Supper with his disciples which formed the heart of the Mass, or eucharist:

‘That these Words of Christ "This is my Body", etc., still stand firm against the Fanatics.’ But at the same Fair were further works of Zwingli, propounding his radically different view. Luther felt weighed down by it all. Bugenhagen calling one day found him laid up in bed ‘praying aloud to God the Father, then to Christ the Lord, now in Latin, now in German’. Then in later summer, still ill and liable to fainting fits, came something further for his depression to latch on to, but at the same time a strong physical challenge. The plague struck again at Wittenberg.

The Elector ordered the University to be evacuated to another town; it left for Jena on 15 August, and subsequently to Schlieben. As on the previous occasion of a major outbreak, Luther remained at Wittenberg. Motivation is not too difficult to disentangle. He always believed in meeting trouble head on. He had in some sort a ‘heroic’ nature and lived up to it and to his own reputation. He also had a vastly compassionate nature and loved to give rein to it. At times of plague he nursed and consoled people to the limit of his energy. Bugenhagen, now the parish priest, also remained in Wittenberg. When his sister, who was married to fellow pastor, Deacon Rorer, died, Bugenhagen and his wife moved into the Friary with the Luthers, to get away from the contaminated house. Rorer moved into the Jonas’s empty house — Jonas being in exile with the University. The Mayor’s wife died, Luther with her till the last. Luther’s little son Hans nearly succumbed, and Kate, pregnant with their second child was ill.

The old Friary was more like a hospital. ‘There are battles without and terrors within, and really grim ones; Christ is punishing us. . . pray for us that we may survive bravely under the hand of the Lord and defeat the power and cunning of Satan, be it through living or dying. Amen.’ Luther was asked about the morality of fleeing the plague and in a pamphlet published in Wittenberg said pastors should stay with the dying, and that indeed many others would really do best to stay, officials and those who had responsibilities to neighbours. But, he said, otherwise naturally it was better to go away.

He gave advice on improving hygiene. The cemeteries could be much improved and indeed made into places where there was more reverence. And he had come things to say about pastoral practice which make him sound like the good Catholic parish priest that in some ways he continued to be: ‘Everyone should prepare in time and get ready for death by going to confession and taking the sacrament once every week or fortnight. He should become reconciled with his neighbour and make his will so that if the Lord knocks and he departs before a pastor or chaplain can arrive, he has provided for his world, has left nothing undone and has committed himself to God.’

A letter to Jonas now at the University’s place of exile expressed the extreme anguish of some moments during the plague:

Thus we Wittenbergers are the object of hate, disgust and fear. . . Martin Luther, dirt for Christ’s sake’ — Lutum Christi. Luther was punning, even now, with a quotation from St Paul, keeping up a front, behind which lay despair and anger at the thought of what he had done, what he was failing to do, and of his sufferings.

During these bad months Luther lectured to a rump of students who had stayed behind. He turned to the thing that kept him going, the doctrine of Christ, expounded by St John in his First Letter. >From now on his lectures tended to progress from concentrating primarily on faith to concentrating primarily on the object of faith. For the rest of his life he preached and lectured on St John, the Gospel and the Letters more than on any text. The first letter of St John in the New Testament opens:

Something which has existed since the beginning,

That we have heard, and we have seen with our eyes;

that we have watched

and touched with our hands:

the Word, who is life —

this is our subject.

That life was made visible:

we saw it and we are giving our testimony.

Telling you of the eternal life

which was with the Father and has been made visible to us.

What we have seen and heard

we are telling you

so that you too may be in union with us.

as we are in Union

with the Father

and with his Son Jesus Christ.

We are writing this to you to make our own joy complete.

Luther pondered on this text, rooted in the writers conviction that he had met the incarnate God, which ended in a tough doctrine of love:

Let us love one another

since love comes from God . . .

We are to love, then,

because he loved us first.

Anyone who says, ‘I love God’,

and hates his brother,

is a liar.

‘God,’ said Luther, is a glowing oven full of love.’ The love from this oven’s heat filled heaven and earth. The warmth of Katie’s oven as she prepared to bake the bread provided Luther with his metaphor as he scribbled notes for his lectures. The heat radiated.

He spoke to his little group in glowing terms of what he called the ‘first article and cardinal point’ of Christian faith, that ‘Christ is in the Father’, quoting from another part of the New Testament: ‘In his body lies the fullness of divinity, and in him you too find your own fulfilment, in the one who is head of every sovereignty and power.’ The lecture became a sermon, and then a lecture again as Bible and theological tradition jostled each other in his exposition of what, formally, was called ‘the incarnation’, ‘the enfleshing of the Word of God’: ‘God places Christ in himself, so that he is utterly and completely made human and we are utterly and completely made divine . . . So now God together with his beloved Son is utterly and completely in you, and you are utterly and completely in him, and all together is one entity — God, Christ and you.’

A further booklet from Zwingli arrived, a reply to Luther’s text on the words ‘This is my body’. Zwingli called it ‘Friendly Rejoinder and Rebuttal to the Sermon of the Eminent Martin Luther against the Fanatics’; he saw himself as an Erasmian and peace-loving, reasonable and humanist, indeed Christian. But his text was laced with sharp criticism of Luther, answering Luther’s violent language with snappish reprimands and demonstrations of the absurdity of Luther’s arguments.

Eventually came the worst days of Luther’s life. ‘For more than a week I was close to the gates of death and hell. . . All my limbs shook. Christ was wholly lost. I was convulsed with despair and blasphemy against God.’ It was a very severe depression, a night of the spirit, utterly unrelieved.

From these desperate days as he emerged from them, came Luther’s most famous hymn: ‘A strong city is our God’ —Ein Feste Burg, ‘a mighty fortress’ in the old translation. Luther was thinking of the old walled cities he knew so well, where a man could be safe behind the high walls with the gates shut. He was thinking of Jerusalem, the heavenly city, he was thinking of Christ — ‘God has established another temple for his dwelling place: the precious manhood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here and nowhere else God wants to be found.’ Guilt and horror of a practically psychotic intensity had combined with physical illness, and ordinary disappointments, to effect a spiritual desolation which was eventually assuaged by prayer to Christ, by meditation on the person of Jesus Christ, on his Words in the New Testament and his sacramental presence.

The depression lifted and the plague retreated. He wrote his hymn, setting it to his own fine Germanic tune, and sat down to pour out a reply to Zwingli, which became his famous ‘Confession concerning Christ’s Supper’. At the end of it he set out the detailed content of his own Christian faith, including his understanding of many of the central doctrines of Christianity. When it came to the Church, he said:

There is one holy Christian Church on earth, that is the community or number or assembly of all the Christians in all the world, the one bride of Christ, and his spiritual body of which he is the only head. The bishops or priests are not her heads or lords or bridegrooms, but servants, friends . . . stewards.

This Christian Church exists not only in the realm of the Roman Church or Pope, but in all the world,. . . dispersed among Pope, Turks, Persians, Tartars, but spiritually gathered in one gospel and faith, under one head, i.e. Jesus Christ.

Christianity was more than a conventional Myth religion. It was a universal community. Its members could be everywhere.

The Visitation started up again in greater earnest. The Instructions were developed into a formal text for the most part drawn up by Melancthon, but with an Introduction by Luther which harped on the State backing. Luther was aware of the historical significance, referring to Constantine, the Emperor who made Christianity semi-official in AD 330. ‘His Electoral Grace is not bound to teach and rule in spiritual affairs. . . he is bound as temporal sovereign to order things so that strife, rioting and rebellion do not arise among his subjects; even as the Emperor Constantine summoned the bishops to Nicaea since he did not wish to tolerate that dissension which Arius had stirred up.’ The Instruction was strong once again on obedience to secular authority and against ‘those who shout out against the law of the land’. It was beginning to look as if the State was Luther’s only really important ally.

The heart of the Instruction had much in it of the official Catholic norms, but the sacraments were cut to two, there were no references to sacrifice, Indulgences or merit; special devotion and saint days were omitted. With regard to public services there was a good deal of flexibility: ‘Holy days such as Sunday shall be observed and as many others as the respective pastors have been accustomed to observe. . . Some sing Mass in German, some in Latin, either of which is permissible.’ Sometimes there was great detail: ‘At vespers it would be excellent to sing three evening hymns in Latin, not German, on account of the school youth, to accustom them to Latin . . . a lesson in German . . . a German Hymn . . . During the week there should be preaching on Wednesdays and Fridays.’ All sorts of things had to be sorted out: ‘Many pastors quarrel with their people over unnecessary and childish things like pealing of bells . . . Although in some places the custom of ringing the bells against bad weather is retained, undoubtedly the custom had its origin in a good intention, probably of arousing the people to pray to God that he would protect the fruits of the earth.’ And on to items which set a whole future structure for religious observance and organisation: ‘The Pastor [Pfarrherr] shall be superintendent of all the other priests who have their parish or benefice in the region, whether they live in monasteries or foundations of nobles or of others.’ Schools should educate children for a practical future; and education should not be abused as a way to a soft living as a Massing priest.

Luther wrote ten sermons to go with the Large Catechism. Once a quarter on four days in each of two successive weeks, sermons were to be given on the essentials, the Creed, the Sacraments the Lord’s Prayer. Luther preached the first set. He appears in these as a new kind of authority figure. No longer was it a bishop, or a pope, nor indeed ‘The Word’, but the pastor and the father of the family who was obliged to take the lead: ‘Assemble with your families at the designated times. . . Do not allow yourself to be kept away by your work or trade and do not complain that you will suffer loss if for once you interrupt your work for an hour. Remember how much freedom the Gospel has given you, so that now you are not obliged to observe innumerable holy days and can pursue your work. And, besides, how much time do you spend drinking and swilling!’ Heads of families must compel their children and their servants to come; and they were not to say ‘"How can I compel them? I dare not do it." You have been appointed their bishop and pastor. Take heed that you do not neglect your office!’ It was a big development from ten years ago when he was trying to get across to them his idea of the real nature of free salvation in Christ — which needed no running across the frontier to pick up Tetzel’s Indulgences!

Luther and Melancthon and the others occasionally allowed such thoughts to cross their minds as they relaxed over the Wittenberg beer. There was a certain feeling of satisfactory confidence as they ended the Instruction: ‘We have given these instructions to the pastors and explained . . . these most important matters of the Christian life . . . namely repentance, faith and good works.’

Instead of the dialogue of choir and counter choir, Luther’s life was woven through with the comedies and tragedies of domestic life. His desk, as of old, groaned with texts for letters, lectures, sermons, state business — for he was often consulted now, not only by Spalatin but more directly by the Elector. To Jonas still exiled, with the University, he wrote again on 10 December 1527: ‘At this hour, ten o’clock, when I returned home from a lecture, I received your letter. I had read only ten lines of it when at that moment I was told that my Katie was delivered of a little daughter. Glory and praise be to the Father in heaven Amen. The mother in childbed is well but weak. And our little son Johann is also well and happy again; the wife of Augustine Schurf is well too; and finally Margaret von Mochau, against all expectations, escaped death. Instead of these people we have lost five pigs. My own condition is just what it has been, namely, as the Apostle says: "As dead and behold I live". . .Deacon John intends to move out of your house and return to the parsonage. Pomer [Bugenhagen — the Pomeranian] will await his wife’s confinement at my place. The students gradually return. Dr Jerome expects to arrive around Christmas, if the situation with the plague remains the way it is now. May Christ gather us together again at one place. Amen. Even weddings are becoming more frequent. . . In the outlying Fishermen’s quarters nothing has been heard of the plague or of death for almost two months.’ The students trickled back: the University formally returned in April. The full official lecturing programme was resumed and the regular meetings of the Bible translation Committee. They had reached the most difficult part. ‘We are sweating over the work of putting the Prophets into German. God, how much of it there is, and how hard it is to make these Hebrew writers talk German! . . . It is like making a nightingale leave her own sweet song and imitate the monotonous voice of a cuckoo.’ That was in June 1528 to Wenceslas Link, now a Pastor at reformed Nuremberg. Luther loved the semitic language, while Erasmus was scornful of Hebrew and loved only Greek.

5 August 1528 to Nicholas Hausmann: ‘My little Johann thanks you, excellent Nicholas for the rattle. He is very proud of it, and delighted with it. I have decided to write something on the Turkish war [Luther felt strongly that Christendom must be defended], and I hope it will be useful. My baby daughter, little Elizabeth, has died. It is amazing what a sick, almost woman-like heart she has given me, so much has grief for her overwhelmed me. Never before would I have believed that a father’s heart could have such tender feelings for his child. Pray to the Lord for me.’ The little girl, born just after the end of the plague, had been weak from the start.

But the family with its sorrows and happiness was faced with threats, once again, to its very survival in Wittenberg. The fantasy of leaving the town returned. In May 1528, Luther wrote a long letter to ‘The Most Serene, Most Noble Sovereign and Lord, Sir John, Duke in Saxony, Elector . . . landgrave in Thuringia, rnargrave in Meissenberg: to our Most Gracious Lord: Personal. . .’ The heart of the letter was a threat which Luther had felt he and Melancthon must utter, though with the utmost diffidence: ‘Even though we should regret the need to do so, we would be compelled to speak out to testify against your Electoral Grace, our most beloved Lord, by whom to this day we have been graciously fed, protected, and overwhelmed . . . we would have to emigrate . . . for the sake of the Gospel in order to avoid having all this disgrace appear to fall justifiably on the innocent Word of God. What could grieve our hearts more than that we and perhaps many fine people should have to be separated from such a father and prince?’

The dire event which threatened to make Luther take himself, Melancthon and others away from Saxony was nothing less than armed confrontation between the forces, on the one hand of the Elector, Philip of Hesse, and the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, defenders of the Reformers, and on the other forces deployed by supporters of the imperial and papal cause, Bishops of Bamberg and Wurzburg and the Archbishop of Mainz, Luther’s old enemy, Cardinal Albrecht, and others. Philip of Hesse had continued his drive to give political unity to the states which were supporting the Reformers, and to enable them to defend themselves against possible imperial military intervention. He had the idea of a pre-emptive strike. There were rumours of an elaborate plot to justify it. He and the Elector consulted Luther about the morality of military action against the Emperor a number of times in 1528, 1529 and 1530, soliciting his support for it. Luther expressed himself as utterly opposed to this on all the numerous occasions he was consulted by the two of them.

There was a possible case in law for saying that the Emperor was ‘only’ one’s feudal superior and in some circumstances might be disowned. But Luther saw him as the real secular authority in German-speaking lands, and felt a strong, somewhat romantic loyalty to the imperial office and its young occupant. Unless the Emperor was shown by due process to have betrayed and abandoned his task and had been unanimously removed from office, then he must be obeyed. To take up arms against him was unthinkable. He refused to countenance war against the Emperor’s supporters, and made it clear that he greatly disliked the alliance based on religious differences. Philip was disappointed. In the summer of 1528, Hesse and Saxony had actually mobilised their forces, but then parleyed with the bishops, and for the moment abandoned the idea of defence by attack.

Immediately after the Diet of Speyer, Philip had drawn up a Church Ordinance intended to enforce reforms on the Church in his territory, and began to take over Church property. However, on asking Luther’s advice, he had been advised in the strongest terms that such things could not be done satisfactorily by legislation alone. There should first be some consensus; legalisation could only succeed with a secure basis in public opinion. In 1528, Philip used Luther’s own less strict Saxon Ordinances. But Luther was not done with Philip, whose military initiatives were deeply resented by the conservative forces. With the encouragement of the Emperor’s brother, Ferdinand (though actually beyond the Emperor’s own wishes not yet known), a Second Diet of Speyer (April 1529) passed a resolution which reversed the decision of the first Diet of Speyer, opposed reforms, and demanded the return of Church property. But this was in turn followed by a further reaction from the militant minority at the Diet, a ‘Protest’ drawn up by the reforming group. Their text, labelled ‘Appeal and Protest’, became the origin of the title ‘Protestant’. Polarisation was continuing. But the Reformers continued to disagree violently among themselves, especially about the reformed Mass and the correct understanding of the words of Jesus at the Last Supper. This was a poor basis on which to build a unified political alliance of reforming states. Philip, therefore, began to badger Luther and Melancthon to come to a general meeting of reformers.

Melancthon at least saw something useful coming out of Landgrave Philip’s usually disastrous initiatives; an Agreed Statement was exactly what his Common Places had been aiming at for the last eight years. Luther disliked and distrusted the idea of a meeting. In any case, he had written his own last word on the matter in his two long treatises in 1526 and 1527. He wrote to the Landgrave: ‘I certainly know that I am unable to give way just as I know that they [other reformers] are wrong. If we should meet and then part from one another in disagreement, then not only Your Sovereign Grace’s expenses and troubles would be lost. . . but our opponents would continue their boasting.’ But the two Philips, Melancthon and Hesse, persevered, and a Colloquy was set up. Luther and Melancthon departed for the Landgrave’s castle in Marburg in September 1529, being joined also by Justus Jonas and Osiander.

4 October 1529. To my kind, dear lord, Katherine Luther, a doctor and preacher in Wittenberg. Grace and peace in Christ. Dear Sir Katie! You should know that our amiable colloquy at Marburg has finished and we are in agreement on almost all points, except that the opposition insists on affirming that there is only simple bread in the Lord’s Supper, and on confessing that Jesus Christ is spiritually present there.

The Landgrave had been astute in organising the meeting, referring only to Oecolampadius and not to Zwingli in his invitations to Luther. At the meeting itself he worked hard at a compromise, on the matter of the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, looking for an agreement to disagree, asking all to consider themselves ‘brothers and members of Christ’, even though there was no agreement on this particular matter. Luther commented to Katie: ‘The Landgrave works hard on this item. But we do not want this Brother-and-member business though we do want peace and goodwill.’

Luther had been partly amused at the whole occasion with its magnificent banquet and politics. Years later, he commented: ‘At Marburg Philip went around like a stable boy, concealing his deep thoughts with small talk as great men do.’ Philip seems to have been successful in keeping the well-fed horse-contestants close to the mark in spite of Luther’s determination to look for an encounter. At the start they had all been paired off in separate groups, Luther being allotted to Oecolampadius, the usually mild though pernickety scholar who had taken to a convent in 1521 in search of peace for his writing, had found it unsatisfactory and had joined Bucer at the von Sickingen castle and, liking it less, went to Basel where he stayed for the rest of his life. But eventually there had to be a plenary session, and then Luther found himself greatly irritated by Zwingli, just as he expected. The latter insisted at times on speaking Greek or Hebrew. This drove Luther to play, disingenuously, the man of common sense. He chalked on the table Hoc est corpus meum, Jerome’s Latin translation of the Greek in the New Testament for ‘This is my Body’, the implication being that there was really nothing to argue about, the meaning was clear. But Luther knew quite well that the Gospel writers wrote in Greek, and were Semites — they did not express their meaning in Latin. Though rejecting, like the other reformers, the definition of the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist as due to ‘transubstantiation’ of the bread and wine into body and blood, Luther insisted on the objective presence of Christ in the food and drink. His opponents spoke of the words ‘body’ and ‘blood’ as being ‘only symbolical’, or of the sacrament as dependent on the faith of the recipient. All the Reformers were of one mind in wanting to abandon the implications of the sometimes hysterical piety of the faithful towards the ‘Blessed Sacrament’, marvelling at a kind of almost horrific miracle in the ‘transubstantiation’ which occurred, as it were automatically, when the correct words and gestures proceeded from a properly ordained priest. But they could not agree on the words to express the true meaning. One product of the meeting was a reconciliation between Luther and his old admirer Bucer, who for a time had been violently opposing Luther in the belief that he believed in some kind of literal ‘localisation’ of Christ’s physical body in the bread, as in a butcher’s shop, to quote their common scathing rejection of the idea.

But fourteen other points were unanimously agreed. Fourteen out of fifteen was a substantial achievement for the Landgrave, especially as it included a long list of central doctrines: the Creator, the Trinity, the Son of God, Jesus, Original Sin, Redemption, Faith, Holy Spirit, Baptism, good works, confession, the State, optional traditions — a formidable list. Luther and Melancthon were rushed by the Elector on to a further meeting at Schwabach, where the Marburg Articles sharpened up by Luther were made the subject of a further declaration and further political alliance, between the Elector and the Hohenzollern Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. Philip of Hesse failed to persuade the towns of Ulm and Strassburg to join the alliance. But an alliance with Ernestine Saxony, Marburg and Schwabach was a step forward in his plan for a well-based alliance of reformed German states.

News came that the Emperor was on the move from Spain, would go to meet the Pope in Italy and then come to Germany, his first visit since the Diet of Worms. Would he call the General Council which continued to be bruited, or would it be just another Diet? The Emperor had seemed to be reacting more strongly recently. In Spain, on receiving news of the ‘Protest’, he had issued a Mandate demanding its withdrawal, and this he followed up by imprisoning the official Delegation from Nuremberg which had come to present the ‘Appeal and Protest’ formally. It was an action he was perhaps more likely to take in Spain, where due process of law was not held so high as in Germany. But it was a little alarming. Meanwhile, Luther had sad personal news to which he could respond only by letter, because his friends did not like the idea of him moving about the country alone, what with continuing military threats, and the general uncertainties.

‘To my dear Father, Hans Luther, a citizen at Mansfeld in the valley; Grace and Peace in Christ Jesus, our Lord and Saviour. Amen. Dear Father: James, my brother, has written me that you are seriously ill. As the weather is bad now, and as there is danger everywhere, and because of the season, I am worried about you. For even though God has thus far given to and preserved for you a strong tough body, yet your age gives me anxious thoughts . . . I would have liked to come to you personally’ but ‘friends have talked me out of it’. However, he and Katie had a suggestion: ‘It would be a great joy for me, however, if it were possible for you and Mother to be brought here to us; this my Katie, too, desires with tears, and we all join her.’ Meanwhile,

I pray from the bottom of my heart that the Father, who has made you my Father and given you to me, will strengthen you according to his immeasurable kindness. . . Let your heart be courageous . . . we have there, in the life beyond, a true and faithful helper at God’s side, Jesus Christ. . . This cursed life is nothing but a real vale of tears, . . . And there is no respite until someone finally battens us down with a shovel. Then of course it has to stop and let us sleep contentedly in Christ’s peace, until he comes again to wake us with joy. Amen. . . My Katie, Hanschen, Lenchen, Aunt Lena, and all my household send you greetings and pray for you faithfully. Greet my dear mother and all my relatives. God’s grace and strength be and abide with you for ever. Amen. Your loving son, Martin Luther. Wittenberg, 15 February 1530.

The letter was despatched by the hand of Cyriac Kaufmann, a nephew, who was to report back.

The international situation now began once again to dictate Luther’s movements. Nine days after he wrote to his father, the Emperor was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Bologna by the Pope. 24 February was his thirtieth birthday. Charles V looked back to the great crowning of Charlemagne in 800. But this was to be the last crowning of an Emperor by a Pope. It was a symbol of aspirations based on nostalgia and theory not well adapted to the facts of the situation, but it did serve to increase Charles V’s own personal morale and boost his conviction that he had a duty and a right to preside over both the religious and the political future of northern Europe. An Imperial Diet would be held in Augsburg in the summer, he announced. Urgent matters on the agenda were two well-tried topics; (1) The Defence of Christendom against the Turks, now extremely urgent since Vienna was threatened. (2) The Reforms. On the latter matter, the Emperor apparently took a surprisingly paternal but realistic stance, intending ‘to give a charitable hearing to every man’s opinions, thoughts, and notions, to understand them, to weigh them, to bring and reconcile men to a unity in Christian truth’.

Luther, Melancthon, Jonas and others were bidden to prepare texts and to meet the Elector at Torgau, and to be prepared to accompany him to Augsburg. They set out from Wittenberg, along with a postgraduate student, Veit Dietrich, on 3 April — another springtime journey towards the south-west, which took them quickly on in the Elector’s entourage to Coburg, where they stopped. It was the last city in the southernmost tip of the Elector’s territory. To go safely beyond it they needed safe-conduct passes, and beyond it Luther could only be safe with special precautions. In any case there seemed to be doubt as to when the Emperor was going to set out from Italy.

Luther reported to Nicholas Hausmann, Pastor at Zwickau, on the news at Coburg:

Yesterday a letter and a messenger arrived telling us that the Emperor is still at Mantua and will celebrate Easter there. . .The Papists are trying extremely hard to stop the Diet, since they are afraid something might be decided against them. . .The Pope is angry with the Emperor, since the latter intends to interfere with ecclesiastical matters, and to listen to the parties . . . The Turk has promised, or rather threatened, to return to Germany next year with very great forces, even leading large numbers of Tartars against us.

Then, on 22 April, came a letter from Imperial Headquarters in Mantua that the Emperor expected to be in Augsburg before the end of April. The Elector had therefore immediately to continue his journey, and to make arrangements about Luther. At Coburg was a castle where Luther would be safe. He was to stay there for the duration of the Diet, and be as available as fast messengers could make him, for consultation. The Elector had hoped to take Luther on with them, as far as Nuremberg and lodge him safely inside that town, with its church reforms now well established, and backed by the Town Council. But the latter had not been prepared to condone what would be a direct challenge to Imperial Law. So Luther had to remain in Coburg. The Elector did not want attention to be drawn to Luther’s stay there. It was still dark in the early morning of 24 April when Luther, Cyriac Kaufman and Veit Dietrich moved into the castle. A few hours later, the rest of the Elector’s party along with Melancthon and Jonas set out on the journey to Bavaria, to the imperial city of Augsburg.

For Luther it was the Wartburg all over again, though not nearly so bad. By the afternoon of the first day he was very bored, and still waiting for his baggage and papers — however, he carried a pen and some scrip with him and sat down to write to his close friend, to whom he had said goodbye only a few hours before:

He sent greetings by name to the rest of the party, and signed off ‘From the Kingdom of the Birds at the third hour, 1530, Martin Luther.’

As at the Wartburg, the birds once again took his fancy. In a further letter to Spalatin he indulged in an Aesopian-type allegory about the jackdaws holding a Diet:

Luther bustled in and out of the Friary, as busy as ever. Meals were eaten swiftly, sometimes alone, sometimes with Prior Brisger, the only other remaining friar. Food for the two priests and any visitors was prepared by Luther’s ever present servant, the ex-student Seeberger, and other occasional serving hands. There was an emptiness about the Friary where until three years ago there had been meals in common, chanted Office in church, and a community routine. Now life was haphazard. Luther’s bed was not made in a year, he said later, and became foul with sweat. He just fell into it at the end of each day. Occasionally, he would eat with one of his friends in the town, and drink — he boasted of his growing capacity. With it was also growing his own girth. Fatter, he was also less well, increasingly plagued with minor illnesses which threatened to become bigger.

He began to have a ringing in the ears, and the first signs of gall stones. Then there was the malaise of threatening depression, ‘attacks’ of despair, temptations from the devil as he experienced them. At night, a cloud of terrible sadness often enveloped him — then he would see only the bad things, the increasing violence in the countryside, the warring of the political authorities, the failure to get people to live by the Word, enemies to the left, enemies to the right, and his own unfaithfulness. He would turn and shout at the devil, and speak a verse of the Psalms. ‘Lord you are my stronghold and my only God.’ Then as he recounted, he broke wind, farted at the devil —take that you swine, you can’t stand up to my God, to the Word, to Christ. Or, in worse agony, he would express his feeling of despair directly to God. The last ‘freedom’ he now had was terrifying. He was fighting phantoms. Every battle had been won. He was left with himself, God — and the idiotic chaos of ‘Satan.’

On 5 February 1525 he preached in the parish church, and spoke from his own anguished heart:

People were beginning to say something like that, in another sense, about Luther’s household. They were asking why he did not marry. Luther had to admit himself that it was an odd business. Two years previously he had received in Wittenberg nine nuns who had managed to escape from a convent near Grimma. Since then he had been operating what amounted to a marriage bureau, matching them up with husbands in Wittenberg and district. The escape had been effected by means of a herring merchant, who always brought his barrels of fish into the convent in a covered wagon. ‘A cart load of vestal virgins has just arrived in the town,’ wrote a student. Some were lodged with families, others in the empty rooms at the Friary. What more eligible bachelor was there than Luther himself? A noble lady had pointed this out to Spalatin in November 1524, and the latter passed the comment on to Luther, who replied:

In the turmoil of public affairs it was still likely enough that the turn of events would enable the law officers to arrive at Wittenberg and carry him off, and it would be welcome enough, for it would be the end of problems too big for solution. It was no time to think of marrying. In any case he felt no spirit for the married life. He had lived by the Rule and kept his distance from women. Sexual tension was sometimes a problem, but he did not think to solve it in married life. In any case, perhaps the world would end soon. The Turks were ever threatening and he might die himself.

But a seed had been sown, and began to live — a barely expressed movement towards filling the emptiness. Once it started to grow, it went quickly — and took root in his mind, doubtless emotionally and sexually, but less so than apocalyptically and polemically: very well, he would show them. He realised that his closest friends might well be shocked — he was by now on a pedestal, someone special, the leader who should not marry. So he said little about his thoughts. If he did do it, he would present them with a fait accompli. In mid April, he teased Spalatin in a letter encouraging him to marry, saying of himself it was strange that ‘a famous lover like me does not get married’ and referring to the ex-nuns who had been of material help in the Friary: ‘I have had three wives simultaneously. . . but you are a sluggish lover who does not dare to become a husband of even one woman. Watch out that I, who have no thought of marriage at all, do not one day overtake you . . . just as God usually does what is least expected.’

As the spring lengthened, the violence in the country worsened rapidly, the Elector became more ill, and all things seemed to be moving to some terrible crisis. Then the Count of Mansfeld, near his old home, invited Luther and Melancthon to go and organise a school in Eisleben. While any journey was now dangerous, it would be an opportunity to preach to the peasants en route through Thuringia. Luther decided to go, and took Melancthon in his party. They found unrest everywhere, and Luther wrote Admonition to Peace, which eventually appeared too late to influence those peasants who were already committed to massive violence by extremist leaders. In Nordlingen, where Karlstadt had been for a time, Luther’s sermon was heckled. However, they reached their destination and Melancthon provided guidelines for a school there which was duly established.

On the way home they visited Luther’s parents and other relations. And suddenly the decision was made. His father was still longing to see grandchildren from Martin’s loins. There was one nun left unmarried at Wittenberg, living with the Cranachs, and she had set her cap at Luther herself. Having declined two successive suggestions for husbands after a previous abortive engagement, she had said she would consider Amsdorf — or Luther. Katherine von Bora seemed to have some spirit about her. She was twenty-six, rather old for marrying at that time.

On his return, Luther spoke to her and they agreed. The projected wedding then became part of a terrible threefold crisis in Luther’s life: the Elector was dying, and a full-scale civil war was now in progress. The ‘peasants’, who included numbers of underprivileged from the towns, were plundering the countryside massively and taking control of castles, religious houses, food supplies and some towns. The rulers were uniting their military forces to oppose and defeat them. Luther saw both sides to be in the wrong: the peasants suffered widely from injustice, but in the end they did not have the right to resort to violent revolt against the established rulers. He then issued his blistering advice to the princes to suppress the peasants ruthlessly in his Against the Robbing and Murdering Mobs of Peasants — this again appeared too late, when the princes were already victorious and indulging in brutal vengeance.

On 4 May, when the military issue was still in the balance Luther wrote to John Ruhel, a councillor to the Count of Mansfeld and married to a relative of Luther, about the need to resist the peasants with all necessary force, speaking also in reckless mood about something he had not confided to closer friends: ‘I would rather lose my neck a hundred times than approve. . . the peasants’ action . . . If I can manage it, before I die I shall marry my Kate to spite the devil, even though the peasants are still fighting. I trust they will not steal my courage and joy. . . Give my greetings to your dear Rib.’ Ruhel and his wife to whom Luther had mentioned Katie von Bora on his recent visit, wondered what kind of a marriage this was going to be. A marriage ‘to spite the devil’? To enable Luther to show his freedom?

Luther’s projected marriage began to look like a function of public affairs. It fitted nicely into the total crisis. The Elector died on 5 May. On 15 May, a series of encounters between the armies of the peasants and of four rulers who had united to defeat them, was capped by a final and total victory for the latter at Frankenhausen. The wedding itself had to wait a few weeks while things got sorted out subsequent to the death of the Elector, and the terrible massacres of the peasants.

Luther wrote of his deceased sovereign that he ‘departed this life in the enjoyment of his full reason, taking the sacrament in both kinds and without the Last Anointing. We buried him without Masses or vigils, but yet in a fine and noble manner.

Frederick was succeeded by his brother Duke John, whose first task was to make sure that the campaign against the peasants was satisfactorily concluded, and to meet up with his allies, young Landgrave Philip of Hesse, Duke George, and Duke Henry of Brunswick. Luther was well acquainted with the new Elector and felt sufficient confidence to send him, on 15 May, a memorandum about the urgent financial and other needs of the University, a memorandum originally intended for Elector Frederick, who in the last twelve months of his life had slowed down his normally very deliberate procedures almost to stopping point. On 8 June, Spalatin was in Wittenberg with the reply, which was reassuring and thoroughly favourable — the ‘praiseworthy University’ would not be neglected, but they must be a little patient while the problems of the civil war were settled. Meanwhile, there was a substantial rise in salary for Luther and other professors; and two new courses in Law were instituted.

In spite of his letter to Ruhel about it, Luther had kept his counsel for the most part about his proposed marriage, especially from his close friends. He wanted no advice, practical or spiritual. Melancthon in particular was not consulted. Then, in the second week in June, Luther alerted his colleagues Johann Bugenhagen and Justus Jonas, Herr and Frau Cranach, and a professor of Law, Dr Apel, but not Melancthon. They foregathered with Luther and Katie von Bora in the Friary on the evening of 13 June, and the legally binding ceremony of marriage was gone through before the witnesses. Luther had ceased to believe in marriage as a true Church sacrament, and no ceremony in church was necessary as far as he was concerned. However, he and Katie immediately set about organising a grand party to include a service of rejoicing in church, for a fortnight later, to celebrate the fait accompli, when Katie would move into the Friary.

‘Indeed the rumour is true. I was married all of a sudden, to silence the mouths which are so used to complaining about me’, he wrote to Amsdorf, by now the local pastor in Magdeburg. Luther spoke of the great wish of his father for grandchildren, and then in his open German way averred: ‘I feel neither passionate love nor strong sexual desire for my wife, but I cherish her. To give a public witness to my marriage, I shall give a party next Tuesday and my parents will be there. I definitely want you to be there too. . . if you can possibly do so.’ The letter went straight on to political matters concerning the Peasants’ War. The massive totals of peasants killed were terrifying. But, meanwhile, he had taken a decisive step in his own life:

Mr George Spalatin, a servant of Christ, my dearest brother in the Lord. Grace and peace in the Lord! The wedding banquet for me and my Catherine will be held this coming Tuesday, that is after the festival of St John the Baptist. I am inviting you, my Spalatin, to it so that I may see myself that you really rejoice in my marriage. Please do not miss it. I have also written to the Marshall for some venison.

At the same time Luther dropped a note to the good citizen of Torgau who had effected the original abduction of the nuns from the convent, and asked him if he would contribute a barrel of beer.

The celebration went off well, in spite of the difficult times. All Wittenberg was there, together with many of Luther’s relations, Above all, his gnarled old father and his mother with the eyes of Luther and an air of well-earned suffering, were there. The Cranach portraits date from shortly after this time. It was a day-long affair, with a procession through the town to church, dancing and feasts. Luther aged forty-two and the bride in her mid-twenties were jolly and confident. Towards the end of the evening there was a rumpus outside, and the voice of someone Luther knew but had not seen for a year, and the last person he expected to see calling on him without notice. The old ex-Dean was standing there, Karlstadt, bedraggled and begging a night’s lodging. He had escaped at the last minute from Frankenhausen when the peasants were making their last stand. Let down over the city walls of Rothenburg in a basket, he had fled to Frankfurt-am-Main. He then decided to try to return and reside in Wittenberg under the new Elector, and wrote a letter to Luther begging forgiveness. Katie and Martin put him up for a month or two before he went off again, on a journey which took him and his wife widely over German speaking lands during the next fifteen years, and left her a crippled old woman in her late thirties when he died. ‘That unhappy man took refuge in my house. The world is not big enough for him now — he is under such pressure that he had to look for protection from his enemy.’ Luther wrote in August.

Luther’s new married status was soon accepted — though more easily by some of his cynically minded enemies than by his friends. Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz, promoter of Indulgences, pluralist, who at one time thought of publicly marrying one of his mistresses, and at other times bitterly persecuted married priests in his diocese, sent Luther and Katie a wedding present of twenty guilders. Luther wanted to refuse it. Katie had it handed to a trustee. Melancthon, however, had grave reservations about the whole thing, only barely managing in public to accept the marriage with something like good grace. In late July, still unable to bring himself emotionally to terms with it, he wrote in Greek to an academic friend, Camerarius, a letter which he later regretted:

There was further moralising and practical comment as Melancthon came to terms with something which he was still seeing essentially as a ‘failure’ on the part of his leader. It had been a severe experience. Melancthon had written a few years before: ‘If there is anything on earth that I love it is the studies of Martin and his pious writings, but above all else I love Martin himself?’ They were soon reconciled, however, and the two families were frequently in each other’s houses.

Before it took place, the marriage had begun to look like a mere function of Luther’s public life, or his spiritual witness. And Melancthon implied in the letter just quoted that Luther was already regretting the matter in July. But the truth was otherwise. The language of public affairs and spiritual crisis had been doing duty for a language and an experience as yet unknown. Luther knew nothing of courtship, or of emotional and sexual fascination. But he very swiftly began to enjoy Katie’s presence in both bed and house, as something a good deal more than merely an adjunct to his public career. Even before the month of June was out, he began to refer to her as ‘My Lord Katie’, half mocking and half pleased as she began to take over the household with the traditional efficiency and bonhomie of the German housewife. In no time, Luther’s letters took on the joyous lineaments of the family household, and less was heard about imminent death. For a few months, his change in status was a shock to himself, and he wondered what he had done. His ‘Table Talk’ a few years later has: ‘In the first year of marriage one has strange thoughts. At table he thinks: "Previously I was alone, now I am with someone." In bed when he wakes he sees beside him a pair of pigtails which he did not see before.’ But the first phase was over swiftly. He soon felt at home with Katie, whom he nicknamed ‘The Morning Star’ because she was up so early in the morning.

Luther’s marriage had given Spalatin the courage to take the matrimonial plunge, too, shortly after Luther’s own wedding. In December, Luther wrote to him: ‘I wish you grace and peace in the Lord, and also joy with your sweetest little wife. Greet your wife kindly from me. When you have your Katherine in bed, sweetly embracing and kissing her, think: Look, this being, the best little creation of God has given me by Christ, to whom be glory and honour. I will guess the day on which you will receive this letter and that night I will make love with my wife in the same way in your memory and think specially of you. My rib and I send greetings to you and your rib.’

The letters began to be full of all sorts of domestic matters. To the erstwhile tiresome friar, Gabriel Zwilling, he wrote in January 1526, ‘My Gabriel, I am sending the measurements for the length and width of the mattress as I would like to have it made.’ Zwilling, however, was still tiresome. The letter went on: ‘Recently you returned some money by placing it in my Psalter. But since the little book was thrown into the wagon, most of the coins were lost. . . It would have been better if you had left the coins for the household servants than that I should have lost them in this way. . . Goodbye, and pray for me.’

As the first months of marriage went by, Luther had a new anxiety: perhaps they would have no children. He waited and worried. But not for long, though afterwards it remained a bad memory. Eventually, all was well. By May 1526, Katie’s condition became part of a little domestic drama. Luther wanted to give a pewter dish to his old student Agricola. Katie did not want to part with it and hid it. In a letter to Agricola, Luther said: ‘Just wait until Katie is confined to childbed; then I will steal it and carry it off.’

On 8 June, he wrote to Rulhel: ‘Please tell Mr Eisleben that yesterday at two o’clock my dear Katie by God’s great grace gave to me a Hanschen Luther. Tell him not to be surprised . . . for he should remember what it is to have a sun at this time of year.’ Luther could never resist a pun. ‘Please greet your dear sun-bearer and Eisleben’s Else. . . Just as I write, my tired Katie is calling for me.’ Two months later he was in the young husband’s seventh heaven still wondering how he could have deserved such happiness: ‘God has blessed me . . . with a healthy and vigorous son, Johann, a little Luther. Katie, my rib, sends her greetings . . . She is well and by God’s grace compliant and in every way obedient and obliging to me, more than I had ever dared to hope (thank God), so that I would not want to exchange my poverty for the riches of Croesus.

In some sort Luther’s life was transformed, and he began himself to live the very thing he had been preaching, family life lit by the faith of the Gospel. Katie turned out to be very able. She did some gardening which gradually blossomed into smallholding; and she encouraged Martin to turn his hands to practical matters he had almost forgotten about — letters went off asking for a quadrant and for melon seed. She enjoyed company, as Luther did. From the beginning she kept the doors open for the inevitable stream of students, who tended to linger longer and longer; and some she began to board in the Friary which the new Elector handed over to Martin and Kate. So began twenty-one years of a newly energised patriarchal household, which became famous both for the perpetual flow of wisdom and buffoonery (to quote Melancthon in a bad mood) from its head, leading eventually to the published ‘Table Talk’, famous too for its rowdiness — older people thought twice before accepting an invitation to stay.

Without Katie, one is tempted to think Luther would hardly have survived the two and half years from midsummer 1525. His reputation was severely damaged by the Peasants’ War itself, and by the defeat of the rebel armies, Erasmus’s book against Luther had finally polarised almost all opinion either pro or contra Luther, and Luther’s reply to it would confirm this. The civil war with its massive death toll (conceivably as many as 100,000), had pulled down the whole of society. Wittenberg was thought of in a general way, both as guilty and as the losers, by those who were not entirely committed to serious reform, and that was the majority of people. Public opinion had it that Luther and his friends had suffered a serious knock. The intake into the University sank low in 1525, and in 1526 to sixty or so (Erfurt was down to a mere fifty). Strict traditional Christians would no longer send their children to Wittenberg. There was no sense yet of ‘Catholics’ versus ‘Reformers’; a separate structure for religion was not thought of by Luther or anyone else, But Luther’s own theology was now clearly committed to the importance of the local church, the relative unimportance of any centralising religious agency, and a conviction of the positive evil of the papacy as it was.

The conservative mass of people, recovering from the shock of civil war, acknowledged that Luther might be in the right on many matters but were waiting to see whether, after the war, an excommunicate and an outlaw still had might on his side. Undoubtedly a minority of rulers were on Luther’s side, the Elector of Saxony, and Philip of Hesse, and many towns. But many had a waiting policy. The burghers of Erfurt discouraged papists from preaching and did not encourage the reformers, either. They excused themselves to Duke George by saying they had to preserve the civil peace. In Saxony, Luther had become a leader, without whom nothing of real importance could be done. But there was also a sense in which Luther was now distanced from many groups of people .

To himself, the situation was dispiriting. Men seemed to be deserting the Word on all sides, and God to be turning away from them. Reformers, with what looked like erroneous views, were springing up everywhere. It was no longer just the swarm of spiritists in Saxony; news kept coming of new reformers giving new teaching in Switzerland and the Rhinelands; Zwingli Oecolampadius — and, among them, his old acquaintance Bucer. He did not wish to get involved with them, any more than he wished to get involved in government at home. But his situation could not be made into something other than it was.

Luther was caught in a political bind commonly unavoidable for any man who emerges as a religious leader of a large number of people. But, furthermore, Luther’s solution to the problem of how to reform the Church was that the rulers of society, itself God-given like everything else, should take on the task of reform if the Church authorities themselves would not do it. But then the rebelling peasants had identified their cause with that of religious reform. In spite of a long record of disowning reform from below, disorderly and unplanned, Luther was thought of as implicated, especially as he had often denounced the rulers for their injustice towards the under-privileged, and as the peasants had referred to him in their pamphlets. Public opinion selects, usually arbitrarily, to give a particular identity to public figures. Luther’s texts of April and May 1525 enabled this to happen in a notable way.

In March 1525, moderate peasant leaders had put out The Twelve Articles, which listed the usual and reasonable complaints: that peasants were sometimes held as property, that wild venison and fish were appropriated by the wealthy, that too much work was demanded for rent, that fields and meadows were misappropriated. But at the head were religious demands: ‘Each community should choose and appoint a pastor . . . to teach us the Gospel pure and simple. . .’ and this was preceded by a statement that the demands were not intended as ‘revolt and disorder’ and that they only asked that ‘the Gospel be taught them as a guide in life’. Also they wanted to control the tithe money collected to support the pastor whom they should choose.

Luther replied to it in his Admonition to Peace. He agreed that many of the demands were reasonable, but insisted that the secular matters were concerns of justice and injustice, and not immediately relevant to the heart of the Gospel message. As for their demands concerning their pastors and the tithes, these demands should only be looked at in the context of existing rights, structures and laws. As it stood, he told them, their demand to control tithe money was simply an attempt at ‘theft and highway robbery’.

Both rulers and peasants came under Luther’s lash as he urged the peasants to be peaceful and the princes to come to terms with them. The text also reflected something of his desperation in the face of past failure to get his message across to either party:

The peasants who have now banded together in Swabia have formulated their intolerable grievances against the rulers in twelve articles, and have undertaken to support them with certain passages of Scripture . . . the thing that pleases me most . . . is that they offer to accept instructions . . . Since I have a reputation for being one of those who deal with the Holy Scriptures here on earth, and especially as one whom they mention and call upon by name in the second document, I have all the more courage and confidence in openly publishing my instruction. I do this. . . as a duty of brotherly love, so that if any misfortune or disaster comes out of this matter, it may not be attributed to me, nor will I be blamed before God and men because of my silence. . . We have no one on earth to thank for this disastrous rebellion except you princes and lords, and especially you blind bishops and mad priests and monks whose hearts are hardened . . . The murder-prophets [a reference to Karlstadt, Muntzer and all the Schwarmerei] who hate me as they hate you, have come among these people . . . for more than three years, and no one has resisted and fought against them except me . . . I beseech you not to make light of this rebellion . . . The peasants have just published twelve articles some of which are so fair and just as to take away your reputation in the eyes of God. . . Because you made light of my To The German Nobility you must now listen to and put up with these selfish articles.

To the peasants he preached almost undiluted non-violence and resignation: ‘Even a child can understand that the Christian law tells us not to strive against injustice, not to grasp the sword. not to protect ourselves, not to avenge ourselves, but to give up life and property, and let whoever takes it have it . . . The punishing of wickedness ‘is not the responsibility of everyone but of the worldly rulers who bear the sword’. He begged them ‘Can you not think it through, dear friends? If your enterprise were right, then any man might become the judge of another.’ Society ought to respect the legal sovereign and established authority.

Luther was truly at his wits end — faced with the chaos of civil war and the breakdown of society:

It is not my intention to justify or defend the riders in the intolerable injustices which you suffer from them. They are unjust and commit heinous wrongs against you; that I admit. If, however, neither side accepts instruction and you start to fight with each other — may God prevent it — I hope that neither side will be called Christian. . . Your declaration that you teach and live according to the Gospel is not true. . .You want power and wealth so that you will not suffer injustice. . .The Gospel however . . . speaks of suffering, injustice, the cross, patience, and contempt for this life and temporal wealth. . . You are only trying to give your unevangelical and unchristian enterprise an evangelical appearance.

‘Take a hold of these matters properly, with justice and not with force or violence, and do not start endless bloodshed in Germany,’ he wrote in a final combined appeal to both sides.

Luther composed this text on his trip to Eisleben in April, his mind full of a rising conviction that some fearful final crisis might be brewing, and that part of it would be his own marriage. By the time it was in the hands of the public, he was beginning to hear of the fall of the cities of Erfurt and Salzungen to the peasants’ army and the occupation of many castles, monasteries and convents. At Eisleben, or on the journey to his parents, he realised that the whole situation was out of control, not least because his own ruler, the dying Elector had refrained from using military force, hoping for a negotiated settlement. After all, it was now too late to talk about peace and negotiation. Violence had to be put down, violently. On his way home he threw all his anger into a very brief pamphlet Against the Robbing and Murdering Mobs of Peasants, the content of which was echoed in his letter to the Mansfeld Councillor Ruhel —already quoted — in which he also said: ‘If there were thousands more of the peasants, they would still be altogether robbers and murders, who take the sword simply because of their own insolence and wickedness, and who want to expel sovereigns and lords and to destroy everything and to establish a new order in this world . . . The peasants are committing perjury to their lords.’ It seemed possible the peasants would win: ‘If I get home I shall prepare for death with God’s help, and await my new lords, the murderers and robbers.’ It was the apocalyptic mood of the pre-marital month.

On 23 May, Luther wrote to Ruhel after hearing of the fall of Frankenhausen to the rulers, horrified and fascinated: ‘I am specially pleased at the fall of Thomas Muntzer. Please let me have further details of his capture and of how he acted, for it is important to know how that proud spirit bore itself . . . It is pitiful that we have to be so cruel to the poor people, but what can we do?. . Do not be troubled by the severity of their suppression. For it will profit many souls.’ It was only towards the end of May that Luther’s Against the Robbing and Murdering Mobs of Peasants came into the hands of readers, when the rulers were already victorious and were indulging in revenge and unnecessary violence. The effect was brutal. The little sentence which was repeated and repeated for the next four and a half centuries ran: ‘Let whoever can, stab, strike, kill.’ Its immediate context, with its unwelcome feeling of a holy war ran:

Public reaction, already aghast at the massive slaughter of the peasants, was immediate. Criticism reached Luther swiftly. At the end of May, he wrote to Amsdorf: ‘You inform me of a new honour. . . that I am called a toady to the sovereigns’, and there followed much talk of Satan, and a quotation from the Psalm used at Compline in the last Office of the day: ‘He who has thus far so often beaten Satan . . . will not allow the basilisk to tread on me. . . It is better that all of the peasants should be killed rather than that the sovereigns and magistrates should be destroyed.’

The day after the legal marriage ceremony, Luther was smarting still and wrote to Ruhel: ‘What an anguished outcry has been caused by my pamphlet against the peasants. All is now forgotten of what God has done through me. Now lords, priests, and peasants are all against me and threaten my death.’ In his letter inviting Amsdorf to the wedding party, he described some of the military detail he had heard about: ‘In Franconia eleven thousand peasants were killed in three different places. . . sixty-one intact cannon were captured . . . In the Duchy of Wurtenberg, six thousand peasants were killed . . . Thus the poor peasants are being killed everywhere.’

In July, Luther wrote a pamphlet defending himself, An Open Letter on the Harsh Pamphlet, spelling out with clarity and aggressive emphasis that there was no way of avoiding one’s obligation to obey established civil authority. He outlined his doctrine of the two kingdoms, the Kingdom of the world where all is law and severity, intended to restrain evil doers on earth, and the Kingdom of God where all is peace and goodness. The same man may be involved in both at the same time, acting appropriately according to the role he fulfils. it was Luther’s solution to the problem of the Church and politics. It had a certain realism about it and echoed his theology of man, always a sinner, always redeemed.

The pamphlet had something of the air of the ‘explanation’ in which inevitably qui s’excuse s’accuse. But, on the whole, Luther took the argument into the enemy country and deliberately repeated the words to which exception had been taken, reinforcing them: ‘Therefore, as I wrote then so I write now: Let no one have mercy on the obstinate, hardened, blinded peasants who refuse to listen to reason; but let everyone, as he is able, strike, hew, stab, and kill, as though among mad dogs, so that by so doing he may show mercy to those who are ruined, put to flight and led astray by these peasants, so that peace and safety may be maintained.’

For some, Luther became a synonym for a man who might turn angrily on his supporters. Ex-friar and professor, the preacher became Fuhrer, he knew little or nothing of the art of Politics, the art of the possible, of compromise, of government — at least he was commonly unable to exercise it. His pronouncements on public policy began sometimes to sound as dogmatic in their way, and as vulgarly insulting as pronouncements from Rome had done. Melancthon bitterly disapproved of this rough side of Luther. Yet he and Luther’s many other friends continued also to retain deep affection for him, knowing that this uncontrolled anger and aggression came from a too sensitive Luther, a man otherwise gentle and generous, of intellectual and moral integrity. The price of leadership in public life is liable to be misunderstanding and type-casting, and the deepening of wounds in one already delicately balanced emotionally. Luther never trimmed. He tended rather to accept the identity handed out to him and to wear the cap he was fitted with.

Polarisation meant more enemies. It also meant firmer friends — and political security, even though it was some years before the new Elector was able to assure one of a safe journey so well as his ‘Wise’ brother had succeeded in doing. However, by the autumn of 1525, in spite of the new enemies, Luther had in his own immediate world new opportunities, and in many ways was living in what was substantially a new world.