William Tyler
Switzerland in Reformation Times: A Country Divided by Religion

William Tyler - Switzerland in Reformation Times: A Country Divided by Religion

- I’m never going to complain again that any of you ask me difficult questions because before we began, our lovely lockdown chair for today asked me what are the secrets of a successful marriage? Because she’d asked how long I’ve been married, I’ve been married 52 years. And I must say that is a more difficult question than any of the history questions you are. And I’m not going to tell you what I said as an answer. However, today we move to the story of, or parts of the story of Switzerland, not a country that many people, even those of us who are Europeans and some of you are listening from outside of Europe, know very much about, we know about cheese, we know about cuckoo clocks, we know about winter sports. And that’s about it, I think. Oh, banking. And that’s about it, I suppose. So we’re going to look in the two sessions I’m doing this Monday and next Monday at two specific slices of Swiss history. First of all, today I’m going to talk about the Protestant Reformation. And before you switch off, I promise you it won’t be difficult to follow and I hope it will nevertheless also be interesting to follow. Next week is Swiss neutrality during the first and second World wars and against the word neutrality, we have to put brackets and a question mark inside those brackets. So again, I think a very interesting subject which opens wider questions. Now I’m going to start today with with the Renaissance. Now, although the Renaissance is said to have begun in the 15th century, and that is true for an artistic point of view, it is the 16th century that we most associate, especially here in Britain, or I should say in England with the Renaissance period.

So I want to begin by saying something that’s blindingly obvious. Change is the very essence of human society, as it is of every human life. Change is what is normal, but if every century is a century of change, and historians are always saying that the ninth century, eighth century of change, the 12th century, a century of, and so on and so forth. But if any century in European history can make a claim to be the century of change, then that to me is clearly the 16th century. Why? Because two intellectual movements closely linked, altered, or fueled modern European society. The two intellectual cultural movements are firstly the Renaissance. And secondly, the Protestant Reformation. The Renaissance was a secular exploration of ideas, which ranged, as you all know, from subjects such as painting to subjects such as astronomy. There’s been a new book published, at least published last week, and my copy arrived yesterday and I couldn’t wait to start reading it. It’s called, and it’s not on my list, I’ll put it on a list or I’ll put it on my tweet. “Earthly Delights”. It’s by the Guardian newspaper’s art critic, Jonathan Jones. “Earthly Delights”, a quotation comes from MOUs Bosch. It is, you don’t need to know about art history. I’m an ignoramus when it comes to art history. But this book is so brilliantly written and so wonderfully incisive that that I don’t, well, I couldn’t put it down last night when I began to read it, and I selected but one small part of one paragraph to explain the Renaissance. And Jones writes, “The Renaissance was radical and destabilising.

A liberation, a liberation of art and thought. It came to an end in the early 17th century, chastened by religious war”. Why religious war? Wars between Protestant Europeans and Catholic Europeans. “The Renaissance was radical destabilising a liberation of art, and thought it came to an end in the early 17th century chastened by religious war and crushed by the material misery of a world that on a technological level was still mediaeval, where prayer truly was a needed comfort. Nor was it an early forum of the industrial age,” rather lovely phrase coming rather says Jones, “It was an eruption of curiosity” I love that. An eruption of curiosity. In fact, in the book review in the Times last week, that was the phrase they chose to hone in on: an eruption of curiosity. So the Renaissance was not just about art, which of course it was, it was about a whole range of things, as I said, like astronomy. But literature or every cultural aspect of life was touched by the Renaissance. So it’s cultural, it’s a cultural change. It’s a change in the way people thought, whether it’s artists using perspective and realism in terms of portraits or whether it was in terms of literature and how somebody like Shakespeare emerges out of the Renaissance, drawing upon Italian renaissance sources. As part of this liberation of thought, this eruption of curiosity, it also touched religion and came to change European religious attitudes forever. The movement that we call Protestantism were protests, hence protests, Protestantism. I’m sorry if some of you know all of this.

Please don’t think I’m trying to talk down to you. Others may not be so clear. And anyhow, I want to be absolutely clear before I move on to some of the detail. So the movement we call Protestantism, when people inside the Catholic mediaeval church began to rail against, rail against the bureaucracy of that church as well as against some of the theology of that church. So it’s not just a theological argument, it’s also a political argument because the very name Christendom is a view of Europe as dominated by the Pope and the church in Rome. And that ideal is challenged in a world where nation states are emerging. In terms of England, you can argue that the modern nation state arrived in the 16th century in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. This is a book called “The Shortest History of Europe”. I love short history. This is even better. “The Shortest History of Europe”, it’s on my blog. And in that, John Hurst don’t be put off things called short if you know your history, they’re very interesting because they give a much broader view than historians often get by concentrating on something. I was once lecturing in history for a weekend at Cambridge, at the University, Extramural Adult Education Department. And I was having breakfast with a historian, from one of the Cambridge colleges. So a proper historian. And he asked what I was teaching and I can’t remember what it was, whatever it was, I said. And I said, what are you teaching? He said, I’m teaching the first half of the reign of James I He said, I don’t do anything else. That’s my specialism.

The first half of the reign of James I. So short histories give you a much better view, I think sometimes the narrowness of academic historians is distracting from the wider context, whether that wider context in is in terms of time or in terms of place. So this is what John Hurst says about the Reformation and the Renaissance. The Renaissance was the first great disruption of the mediaeval world. The second was the Protestant Reformation. This was a direct attack on the church. Its aim was to return to a Christian Church, to what it was like before it became Roman. In other words, before the Pope started off the early church. The church acquired its Roman features because it grew up within the Roman Empire, right across the Roman Empire, Christianity spread. And we have here in Roman Britain, in England, physical examples of of Christian worship in the police car park of all places in the city of Colchester, which are a great Roman city. There are the remains of a Christian Church. There are Christian symbols on the walls at the villa at Lolling Stone in Kent, there’s Christian symbols or over or over Roman Britain. The church acquired its Roman features because it grew up within the Roman Empire. And when the empire collapsed, the church continued with its pope who was like an emperor figure. And archbishops and bishops who were like the administrators of the old Roman Empire and beneath them in every locality, the priests, this holy body had its laws, its punishments, its dolls and its system of taxation. And throughout the middle ages, the Pope sought to exercise secular power over the nations. And one nation that that always resisted the lure. Rome was here in England. We were always in dispute with Rome or nearly always in dispute with Rome. Think Henry II and Beckett. It’s a strange story when you look at it.

The idea that everybody was happy with the Popes is quite untrue. Indeed, the Popes themselves weren’t happy with themselves. When you remember that there were two popes at one point in the Middle ages, one in Rome and one in Avignon, in France. PS if you’ve never been to Avignon, please go. It’s fantastic. That’s a PS. Let me move on and say nothing ever, does it, comes fully blown as though it comes down from heaven itself. There’s always a hinter land behind every story. So too with the Reformation, there have been strong descent against the Church of Rome back in the Middle Ages. If we just give two examples, I give two examples. The first is John Whitclif, the Oxford Scholar here in England. And the second is Jan Huss in what is now the Czech Republic. And there are others who challenge Rome, challenge Roman authority and challenge Roman theology. But the Reformation proper, the Protestant Reformation proper, is usually dated by historians to a day in October 1517. And that story is told by Simon Sebag Montefiore in his book “World”, which I now can say is in paperback, a massive paperback. But it’s such an interesting book and also interesting to look at what he misses out as well as he puts in. I find that, so I find the index is a fascinating. It’s about Luther. In October, 1517, Martin Luther wrote an attack on the Pope. His so-called 95 theses, 95 Points of Disagreement with Rome, which he nailed alongside other notices on the door of Wittenberg’s church. But he didn’t depend on the church doors.

And this is really important. He deployed the new medium of printing. Ultimately 3.1 million copies were published, 3.1 million. That’s an enormous figure given the level of illiteracy in Europe at the time. But of course it got the message out and if only one person in a community could read, they could read it to the others. And that’s exactly what happened. It was an enormous challenge to Rome, was this. And really there was no going back after this. And if you think the story and I, educated by evangelical Protestants at my public school, was often presented with this story as a story of good and bad, good Protestants, bad Catholics. Well forget it. It isn’t like that at all. Luther is certainly not a person that we would warn to in any sense today. He was as Simon Sebag, Montefiore advises, and vis he was fixated on faeces and sex. Well, I have to say the Protestants of many evangelical Protestants are still obsessed by sex. Not the doing of it, but the doing of it in ways that they disapprove of it. It’s an extraordinary part of Evangelical Protestant morality. But he was also fixated on faeces. Well, I think a psychiatrist can have a lot to say about that. Simon Sebag Montefiore goes on, he later denounced the Pope as a transsexual sodomite.

His orders sealed with the devil’s own faeces. This man is certifiable, isn’t it? Written with the anus pope farts. Oh, for goodness sake. Montefiore goes on. He unleashed savvy diatribes against Jews. Quote, “We’re wrong if we don’t kill them. These devil people, poisonous worms full of the Devil’s Faeces”. There we go again. “While they wallow in like which they wallow in like swine, they’re synagogues incorrigible horrible an evil slut”. We’re going back to sex. Well, I think Luther is certainly, he’s certainly not sane in the normal sense of the word. And yet his challenge to Rome changed the world. Now it doesn’t mean that those who followed him believed half the nonsense that he said. But it is worth recalling that he was not, I suppose in an understated English way, I should say he was not a nice man. And it’s one of the reasons that other Protestant preachers broke. Now one of the interesting things about Protestantism, and this is easier to say to a Jewish audience ‘cause it becomes recognisable to Jews and to Protestants, Protestantism subdivided and subdivided again and subdivided further. Why? Because Protestants like Jews were expected to think for themselves and in thinking for themselves, they could see the flaws in the particular brand of Protestantism they were following. And it only needed a charismatic preacher within to say, come on, this is nonsense. Follow me. And to set up another independent church. So it’s a fragmentation. Protestantism isn’t one religion, it’s a fragmentation of a religion.

And that’s why I say it’s familiar to Jews and it’s the same reason of people thinking for themselves and following charismatic preachers. Now, the Protestant banner, if you like, Luther was German of course, but the Protestant banner was taken up in all the most unlikely spaces in Switzerland because it was in Switzerland that two men emerge that were to have a major force with Luther in changing the course of European history. One was Swiss, a man called Zwingli, Z-W-I-N-G-L-I. And the other was Calvin, C-A-L-V-I-N. And this is a book on the history of Switzerland. It is the best, probably the only modern history of Switzerland by church and head published by Cambridge in their history of all countries. It’s a very good series, “A Cambridge history, A history Of” if you ever want a history of a particular place that you don’t know anything about, look up “A History Of”, put in the name of the place and put after it Cambridge University Press. And you’ll come up with excellent references. This is the Cambridge history of Switzerland. It’s again on my blog, on my booklet, “the Reformation Movement to reject the Roman Church in its theology, which began with Martin Luther in Wittenberg, found a series of key protagonists in Switzerland where first Ulrich Zwingli, and then the French immigrant Jean Calvin contributed to the creation of a second magisterial church. The reformed or Calvinist church in opposition to Rome.

Some of England’s earliest followers also helped found other movements, which we know now call Anabaptist or Mennonite”. Now I’m not going into all the various types of Protestant churches. It would take us too long, be too confusing. And frankly I don’t think I could do it because the theology is so extraordinarily involved. Probably of all of those of you who are listening, it’s probably the Americans that are most familiar with the various types of churches and seeing worth like Mennonite and Anabaptist and Lutheran and all the rest of it. But that is not the story today. The story today is how Protestantism, particularly through Zwingli, and Calvin, as well as Luther, but I’m concentrating on the two who emerge in Switzerland changed the course of European history and also of course changed or influenced the course of American history through immigration from England subsequently, subsequently from Germany in the early days of England who were religious as well as political refugees, but also later with the influx of German Protestants into America. Let me turn over the page. So let’s turn to this first Swedish reformers Zwingli. His reforming zeal was a parallel development to that of Lutheran Germany. It isn’t a sub Lutheran approach, they are parallel. Things were happening in Europe. As I indicated earlier, there were already challenges to the church Wickler in England, Hauss in the Czech Republic. And so this movement in Switzerland, led by Zwingli, was in parallel, not a follow up of Luther, it wasn’t a spinoff.

Zwingli’s preaching began in the Swiss city of Zurich where he became the people’s preacher. Now let us explain a bit. We think of the Catholic church with a priest and a parish. That’s true, but they also had preachers as did in England, the early Anglican church. And preachers weren’t necessarily, they weren’t the vicar or priest of a parish. They were people with an expertise as a preacher. Now in Switzerland, divided into cantons with the power of cities like Zurich. The Zurich authorities lay authorities would appoint a preacher. So it’s like getting any other job. You went to end competition, unless they had selected someone like a football manager is selected. They selected a good preacher because it’s in their own interests to have a Christianity that preaches about law and order, if we’re taking a sort of Marxist approach to it. And he was appointed in 1518 as the people’s preacher. Now he’s appointed as a people’s preacher under Catholicism. He’s appointed in 1518. That’s one year before Luther put hammers in his 95 thesis. Now Zwingli is on a journey. It’s a dreadful word we talk in that politicians use today. He’s on a journey from Catholicism to Protestantism. He based his Zurich sermons on the Bible. Well this is what a 19th century biographer of Zwingli says. I’ll read it to you. As Zwingli was appointed on Saturday the 11th of December 1518. And this is a quotation from this 19th century historian, giving thanks for his appointment. Zwingli said that he had undertaken with the help of God to preach on the Holy Gospel of St. Matthew in its entirety, rather than broken up as was the prescribed Sunday gospel readings.

He wanted to expand it according to scripture and not according to human opinions. Hang on, on who’s in doing the interpretation? Zwingli is. So when he says it makes his statement and not according to, he wants to expand it according to scripture, not according to human opinions. Yes, but he is interpreting that scripture and his opinion is human. Well, there you are. Make your own judgments about that. His preaching style. That’s what’s important. There’s no TV, there’s no soccer to watch, there’s nothing. There’s no telly. So people went to hear good preaching. And his preaching style, which was very flamboyant perhaps is the word, attracted a large following. And his sermons became more now outspoken. You see, he’s pushed by the congregation. He gets, I don’t suppose they gave him a round of applause, but he perhaps came up to him afterwards and said, oh, Mr. Zwingli, that was wonderful. I really enjoyed that and I enjoyed particularly this. And he would just sort of begin this further route away from Rome towards Protestantism. And his message, I said before, theology is only part of it. And maybe a small part. And again, quoting from the 19th century biography, a German biography, I read this: “as Zwingli preached against idleness, immoderation in eating, drinking, and dress, taking pensions and mercenary service under foreign rulers and the repression of the poor”.

So Protestantism has a moral message about the individual. Why are you idle? And a social message, what have you done for the poor? That’s why in many respects, Protestants and Protestantism and Judaism are more similar than say Judaism and Catholicism. There is a big emphasis under Protestantism, both upon the individual’s morality, but also upon the individual’s part to play within a wider community. Vice was the greatest devil to be defeated in Protestant eyes. Vice wow. And vice is often associated with sexual deviance of whatever form. That wonderful American novel, 19th century novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Scarlet Letter concerning adultery where in the art, Hawthorne nails it, it’s the hypocrisy of the Protestant minister who is guilty of adultery at the core of it. If you’ve never read The Scarlet Letter, do so. It is a fascinating insight into early American history, but it’s also the same period in England. Yet it is about the hypocrisy of Puritanism. And it is as valid, I think today, as it was when Hawthorne penned it over a hundred years ago. In 1522, events in Europe reached a crisis point. Now, please don’t laugh, but the crisis has become known as the Affair of the Sausages. How can you take something seriously, which is called the Affair of the Sausages. But remember a lot of the Swiss are German, so sausages are important. No, no, let me read you a little bit about the what’s going on in this Affair of the Sausages. And it shows how… it shows how non theological all of this was. It’s simply hitting out at the Church of Rome telling you what to do. I always say if I’m teaching in England to the English of the 16th century Rome, which trying to impose European order on a country that didn’t want it. And in the 21st century, Brussels was trying to do so, hence Brexit is nothing out of the ordinary in terms of English history.

It’s an antipathy towards being told by Europe, continental Europeans, what to do. The British never liked being told what to do, even by fellow Brits we must say. And I’m going to read you if I may, this little piece from this history of Switzerland, “A visible break with the old Roman church took place in Zurich during Lent in 1522 when a printer Christophe Frosthamter gave his workers sausages for supper the workers live in. They gave them sausages for supper. This act violated the Church of Rome and the city’s laws on fasting before Easter, in Lent you’re not meant to eat meat. And here they were eating sausages. Zwingli preached the following week on Christian’s freedom from dietary regulations, making his defiance of church authorities very public. And the city council chose not to punish him. So this is the moment in Zurich where the Zurich cancelled back Zwingli over the issue of eating meat in Lent, hence the Affair of the Sausages. And I know all of this sounds very odd and that’s why I want to emphasise this. We talk about religious division, yes, yes. But if we’re arguing over sausages, it’s about something much more profound. And what is profound about it is not taking orders from Rome. This is another account, this is the printer’s defence of why he gave sausages. First instance as a country to your notice that I eat meat in my house, I testify as follows. I have so much work to do that it stretches my bodily and material resources. I have to work day and night, work days and holidays to have things ready for the fair at Frankfurt.

I cannot always buy fish and so on and so forth. Justifying his use of sausages and justifying his breaking of church law and local law which merely follows church law. But what happens is quite different than that. What happens is Zwingli now enters the debate, as I said, just now a week after the affair, hit the headlines as it were in Zurich, Zwingli preached. And this is from, this is Zwingli’s own words. To sum up briefly, if you want to fast, do so. If you do not want to eat meat, don’t eat it. But allow other Christians a free choice. That is a death note to the Catholic church, a free choice. And that’s a political challenge, which in the end is the lead to the formation of the United States. Because those who wanted a free choice in England, politically, are not granted it by Charles the first. And they leave, and they leave in large numbers to go to the new world, to the New England states. That’s where they’re going. And you can say it’s about religion, but it isn’t. It is a challenge to the authority of Rome, which says, this is what you do. And they’re saying, no we aren’t. We have a freedom of choice. Interestingly, I was at boarding school during the 1960s and right across India, this right across the world, 1960s is a moment of challenging authority. When I first went to the school in 1959, the school had boundaries, where you were, boundaries around it. Where you were not allowed to go outside it on your Sunday afternoon walk and they had Prefax stations and you were beaten, if you stepped one foot outside the borders, the boundaries of the school, that the school had laid down, there was a revolt. We said, we’re not going to do that.

This is nonsense. We can walk where we want to walk as long as we’re back when we’re told we’re back. And the authorities have to give in. Freedom, free choice is what Protestantism is urging. You are an individual. So you have free choice. You aren’t going to be told by the church, nor are you going to be told by the king, I’m as good as the next man. Really important in the history of Europe, very important in the history of America. Very important in the history of the world. Zwingli goes on, if you are an idle person, you should fast off them and refrain from food that arouses you. Oh no. They can’t. They can’t, they can’t stop this vice thing that arouses you. The worker moderates his lusts by hoeing, ploughing, and working in the field. You say, but idlers will eat meat without needing to. The answer is that those very same people fill themselves with luxurious foods which inflame them even more than salty and spicy meats. Oh my God, this is dreadful. We’re back. We’re back to don’t eat salt fish because it might make you feel sexy. Oh, and that’s dreadful. If you’ll be of Christian temperament acting this way, if the spirit of your belief teaches you thus then fast. But allow your neighbour to use Christian freedom. You see Christian freedom, which is not a phrase we would use today, but we would use the phrase political freedom. We would use the word democracy. And it’s through this renaissance reformation, challenge of old ideas. And once an idea is set loose, you can’t contain it in a little box, it will spread out. If I’ve got a glass of water here, if I spill it on the floor, the little blob of water on the floor won’t just stay there. It’ll spread out. And that is exactly what happens with the preaching of Protestantism. And it’s the link between Protestantism and political democracy that is so important.

And so all of you who are listening from English speaking countries, and plus of course countries like Israel, but Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States, all of this idea of freedom comes out of, this democracy comes out of this. And as I said before, this fits Judaism. Now we won’t go into, 'cause I haven’t time to go into the effect of the reformation on Judaism, which is limited. It’s the effect of the enlightenment on Judaism. That’s important. But more important still is the development of democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Let me move on quickly. I’m on page four. I hesitate to say I’ve got 12 pages, perhaps some of them don’t have anything of interest and I’ll miss them out. But it wasn’t a swing day that was going to have the most impact on Europe and the wider world. It is a Frenchman who was exiled to Geneva. John Calvin. Geneva had converted Protestantism prior to Calvin’s arrival. And the Genevan authorities didn’t at first like Calvin. And he was banned from the city in 1538. But within three years, Calvin is invited back by a new set of governors in Geneva. Why, the first banding was he had a strict moral code, much stricter than Zwingli. In fact, remember what I’ve just said? If you want to fast, fast, if you don’t want to fast, don’t fast. But don’t criticise the others is his message. But the moral code that Calvin preaches is a much stricter form of Christianity, which is present today in all countries where there is Christianity, it is particularly notable in America, it is in Scotland, very strict. But church attendance in Scotland has dropped enormously. In America, it’s probably where you would look to see it most. The editors of the book, the Reformation, Germany and Switzerland, which is on my list, write this. "A great part of the conflict produced by Calvin in Geneva revolved around his belief that discipline was necessary to enforce and consolidate reform. In Calvin’s view, this may have been a necessary means of promoting upright Christian life, but it may have been perceived by the Genevans who had just rejected papal tyranny as a new form of oppression”.

Let that just sink in. They rejected papal tyranny for the Calvinistic tyranny. In January 1537, Calvin submitted to the Town Council a proposal for the establishment of a former discipline in Geneva. It read, and this is a quote, our Lord established excommunication is a means of correction and discipline, by which those who led a disorderly life, unworthy of a Christian and who refuse to amend their ways and return to the right path after they have been admonished, are expelled from the body of the church and cut off as rotten members until they come to their senses and acknowledge their fault. So if there is in us any fear of God, this ordinance should be enforced in our church. Reference again to Hawthorne’s Scarlet letter. This is unforgiving morality. And in its extreme form, a tyranny. And the Genevans who criticised it and thought of it as an equivalent of papal tyranny were absolutely correct. Perhaps inevitably, in a country like Switzerland, divided not only by language, but also divided now by religion should come civil wars. In the Europe of the 16th century, religious wars, and I use that term loosely because there were political issues at stake, but we loosely, historians call them religious wars. Even though they were often fought for quite political reasons. The religious wars were profound across 16th century Europe and 17th century Europe. In Germany we have the 30 Years War. In France we have the Wars of Religion. And in England or Britain as a whole, we have the Civil War. We have these wars which circulate around religion even though religion itself in terms of its theology, may only play a minor role to wider political considerations.

And Switzerland had a civil war called the Kappel War. K-A double P-E-L fought between the Protestant cantons. Remember, Switzerland is divided into cantons, it’s confederation, to the Protestant and Catholic cantons. Now you can forget whether they are predominantly Lutheran or Calvinist because the main enemy to Protestants is not the other Protestant churches, but the external enemy of Rome. So the Civil War in Switzerland is fought between Protestant cantons and Catholic cantons. The Protestants were defeated in the war and Zwingli lost his life in battle, which pretty well marks the end of any chance of Zwinglism dominating the Protestant world. There was a subsequent peace signed in Switzerland between the two faiths of Catholicism and Protestantism. And it issued a guideline for their future living together. The Swiss always seemed to me to be always a very sort of logical, calm people. And this is certainly the case here when we’re looking at how they bring together the two sides after the war is concluded. And I, oh, if I got the right book that would help this one, and I will this from the history of Switzerland, and it goes like this. What they do, what they do is agree after the war is over, that they will live peacefully together. Since church and head in their history of Switzerland, they will agree that a canton can decide whether it’s Protestant or Catholic and it will not lead to war. They have agreed that they are above all else, Swiss, and they will live in harmony with each other. One of the reasons that Switzerland is such an interesting, interesting state, and this is certainly not how it plays out. In England, for example, they get a practical tolerant modus vivendi. Now that does not mean that there isn’t further trouble.

There’s a peasants war in Switzerland. They have further religious wars. But in truth, after the end of the Kappel War, they have come to a logical agreement. Protestant cantons are Protestant, Catholic are Catholic. We learn to live together. As a result, Switzerland did not enter the German 30 years war, which it might well have done. And that is a war within the Holy Roman Empire. But Switzerland had declared itself independent of the Holy Roman Empire as early as 1499. But no one had ever sort of pushed it. But now it is seen after the Treaty of West failure in 1648, which ends the 30 Years War. Switzerland is from this point on what we know, Switzerland is today, fully independent, confederation, with different languages, different ethnicities, French, German, Italian, and different religions. Catholic and Protestant and the Protestant, subdivided. And they’ve managed to live together in peace, largely, from the mid 17th century onwards. In the 18th century, the coming of the Enlightenment enables Swiss democracy to be even more entrenched in the country. It does not, for example, get involved in the Napoleonic Wars. Switzerland becomes a very different story to that of most of Europe. And because it’s a European story, but not like the rest of Europe. It’s a reason why studying it is perhaps important. And as I said at the beginning, we don’t study Swiss history. I think most people would only manage to tell you about William Tell and the wretched Appel.

But, but no, no, no. It’s much, much more important than that and has messages for the rest of Europe. Europe is an odd concept and well, we should know in Britain because we always want to be part of Europe, 'cause we don’t like being told what to do. So we’ll tell them what to do. And then secondly, we don’t want to be telling them what to do. We just don’t want anything to do with them at all. We go through phases of this in English history and the Swiss in that odd sense, somewhat similar, they don’t want to be involved. And yet, as we shall see next week with World War I and World War II, that isn’t entirely true. It’s a complex story. It’s not simple. Nothing in history is ever simple. The sort of history we were taught at school isn’t simple, was simple, but it it simplifies something that is inherently complex, inherently with loose ends, inherently impossible to put within a box. This term, children, we are doing the 18th century. Well, you can’t, without knowing the 17th century and the 19th century. You’ve got to take a much broader view than is taken in school curricula and in my view, in university curricula, although you may might rate the argument that detailed study has a use. Well, indeed it does. But I’m arguing today for a broader understanding. I’m arguing today that what I’ve been talking about is as relevant in the United States of the 21st century or the Britain of the 21st century. And with obvious parallels to Israel in the 21st century. It’s Calvinism that spreads. Calvinism spreads to large parts of Germany, to Scotland, indeed the established church of Scotland called the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which is an alternative name for Calvinism today.

Think, Americans, of the Presbyterian Church in your country, the Presbyterian Church of Scotland is so interesting. King Charles has to be a member of the Church of England to be king. When he crosses the border, he immediately becomes a member of the Church of Scotland. It’s one of the miracles of the 21st century that as he moves across the border, God switches his allegiance. What about the churches in Switzerland today? Well, the latest figures are that just over 34% remain Catholic. 22 ½% percent Protestant. Not what you might have thought, but 30% claim to have no religious allegiance whatsoever. And if you say, well, how did Catholicism survive? Well, Catholicism survived because it had a counter reformation, which accepted some of the challenges presented by the Protestants in a revival of the Catholic church. And from that date right up to the present day, you can see that the Catholic church has, when challenged, either from Protestantism or today by secularism, over again over the issue of sex or priests not marrying and so forth, rises to the challenge and is beginning to change things. Only last week where there was a report of the Pope meeting, an LGBTQ+ set of clergy to talk in that way. And on that theme, Lutheranism itself remains, but largely in the far north, in Denmark, in Norway, in Sweden, in Finland, and in Iceland.

And of course in the United States, there’s 3 million Lutherans in the United States, based on the headquarters in Chicago. But I don’t know, I’m not going to talk about the American Lutherans because I know nothing about them. But in terms of Northern Europe, these countries are interesting, in they are, in many people’s views, those with the best educational systems and those with the best social, social structures in society. And that comes through Lutheranism. And I find that fascinating. In England, of course, the Church of England’s never been bothered about education, 'cause it’s only the elite that traditionally had education and was still arguing about elitist education in Britain in the election, which is going to take place either later this year or next year, next year almost certainly. And the issue about private education and public education and so on, very Church of England argument or very English argument, and not an argument that holds sway in the North. Today, the ideas between Calvinism and Lutheranism blend much more than they did, although there are breakaway groups. So if we’re thinking, as I said earlier about United States, there’s many breakaway groups which might have quite odd ideas to mainstream thinking. So let’s say, what is the importance of the Reformation? Well, first of all, I’ll say, and read you a little piece from the history of Europe in bite-sized chunks. Another short history by Jacob Field. And Jacob writes this very briefly and very succinctly. The Reformation led to a permanent religious divide in western Europe.

Protestantism became the leading religion, in England, Scotland, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and much of Switzerland, and the Holy Roman Empire. And that tended to divide Western Europe in the way that Greek, sorry, in the way that Christian Orthodoxy divided the Eastern Empire in Byzantium from the Western empire in Rome and the Orthodox churches of Eastern Europe, Russia, Serbia, and so on. Secondly, what did it do? It also led to a revival and modernization, as I said, in the Church of Rome. And I just read this, “The Roman Church reformed itself to its organisations and teachings at the Church Council of Trent in 1543 to 1562, and reached out energetically after the 1550s to support Catholic Europeans, including the many Swiss who remained Catholic. Both churches in Switzerland claimed a monopoly on religious truth and required obedience of public adherence to their tenants. But following that civil war, they agreed to live in some degree of harmony”. Now, I’ve promised some of you that I’ve spoken to recently, a postscript to this story and the postscript is of very English story. If I short circuit by reading a paragraph from the Wikipedia article on Reformation in Switzerland, I read this “Many Huguenots French Protestants and other Protestant refugees from all over Europe, fled to Balal, Geneva, and New Chattel. Geneva under Calvin demanded their naturalisation and strict adherence to the Calvinist doctrine. Whereas Ball, where the university had reopened in 1532 became a centre of intellectual freedom. Many of these immigrants were skilled craftsmen or businessmen, and contributed greatly to the development of Swiss banking and the Swiss watch industry, just as the Huguenots who fled to England”.

It brought in great skills, which we didn’t have from the silk trade to watches again and to iron work and so on and so forth. And hairdressing, ladies’ hairdressing, they brought into England. So the Reformation had a big impact, and Switzerland began to be seen by Protestants who were refugees from persecution as a place of safety. And that is extremely important when it comes to thinking about England because after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, they passed legislation, which was called the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, which meant we’ll forget the Civil War. Turn a new page over and start again. It’s actually a rather unusual example of tolerance, because that story of tolerance is lost because they dug up the body of Cromwell and publicly hanged him and then put his head on a stake by London Bridge for years afterwards. We know they did that, but in truth, they only accepted 104 men from the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion. Everyone else was forgiven what they did in the Civil War. And that was a stroke of genius on behalf of largely Charles II himself, which meant that we could live with each other. You might make a comparison with the United States in the aftermath of the American Civil War in the 1860s, where those attempts of oblivion, are not quite, are not quite done as it were even now, and resurface in various ways, such as the attack on the Capitol where confederate flags were taken in. No one here in Britain would, I know its only 150 years after the American Civil War, and it’s much longer. But no one did campaign for the Cromwellian regime after the restoration of the king. We do not have Republican rebellions. It doesn’t happen. About a dozen of these people who were accepted from the app made it to Switzerland.

All of these people were ed, i.e., those who had taken part in the trial or in the execution of the king, in other words, had sat as judges during his trial or had signed the document of execution. The most important was a man called Edmund Ludlow, who had been an MP, a soldier in the Civil War, wrote a history of the civil war, of his own experiences. And after the war was over, served as Cromwell’s second in command in Ireland. But most significant of all was one of the judges at the King’s trial in 1649 and also signed the warrant for his execution. He fled to Switzerland to the Lake Geneva, to the banks of Lake Geneva, to a town that I’d been to. And I’m sure some of you have called Bevey, B-E-V-E-Y. A long time ago when I became freelance, I promised my wife that I would never do history on my holidays. Well, I’ve never quite kept to that. And we were in Bevey, and we were in a hotel, just in the main square and the hill, the sea is in front of us, the hills rise up behind us and we’re looking to take a walk. And I say to my wife, I think we’ll walk up the hill. And that looks interesting and there’s a church there. I wonder what, said he, knowing full well that inside that church there are buried some of the Regicides who fled to Switzerland to escape the wrath of the King and indeed, the House of Commons, which is now very royalists, to live their lives out in peace and die in peace, far from their homeland. And I went into that church and at the back of the church is a sort of, it’s a sort of squared area. I don’t know what it was used for. Nothing, I don’t think. And maybe just to bury people inside the church itself. And there they are, three English burials. And I stood and I looked at these and I have to say, knowing the history, it brought a lump to my throat. These were Englishmen, ordinary Englishmen like me, who were forced from their homeland to live and die. What must then have seemed to be thousands and thousands of miles away from home. And they lived a lot of it under the threat of assassination. Indeed, one of the English regicides who did escape to Switzerland, a man called Sir John Lyle, was in fact assassinated.

The English used Irish assassins to go out and knife them to death. The three that are buried at Bevey were not knifed, if you are ever in be Bevey, the church looks incidentally very English. It isn’t, but it looked so it’s not very far to walk up. Halfway up the hill, behind the main square, go up to the church, it’s called St Martin’s, and inside go to the back of the church away from, or go to the other end. And there you’ll see these Englishmen buried. And it is, well, for me, it was quite an emotional experience. Now, I don’t know how to end this and I had various endings and I abandoned them all within half an hour of giving the talk. And I’m going to end with how the concise history of Switzerland ends. Swiss history deserves to be rescued from the way it has been overlooked and misconstrued in recent years and needs to be presented in its rich fullness and significance. Well, I can’t do it rich fullness, but I hope today I’ve given you part of the significance of it and next week, even more significance in a modern world where the issue of neutrality and the definition of neutrality is so difficult, when we look at the Swiss during the first and second World Wars. So thank you ever so much for listening tonight and tonight here, and I’ll see if there’s anybody with questions. Oh, I have got some. I didn’t think any of you would.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, there were Jews in Switzerland, but I think somebody else, Patricia is talking about that. It’s a small community. Yes.

Yeah, you are absolutely right, Monte. Orson Wells is mentioned in the third man film of cuckoo clock is exactly exactly what I’m getting on. And the authors of the history of Switzerland are getting too, that we dismiss Switzerland.

Oh, Michelle, you a person after my own heart. Michelle says, I’m a huge fan of shortish history series. Agree wholeheartedly, panoramic view, much clearer and more useful than honed detail. Thank you very much. When I’m lecturing, I try to give a wider picture and a context for the talk, but I also like to hone in, as I’ve done about the last bit of my talk about on Bevey on some detail, because I think both have a place, and I hope both supplement each other. Who is this mock cuckoo clocks were invented in the blackboard is a suburban myth that they were invented in Switzerland. Great. And remember, it’s Protestant Germans who come, in the piece that I read, who come to Switzerland. So who are Germans who brought cuckoo clocks, who brought banking. It’s other, it’s Protestants that come to do it.

Three popes, one in Portugal, says Mike. Luther did not get enough sex. Ah, there is an mike. I not pursuing that, probably you are right. But he was married. That’s, you could argue Mike, that one of, if I was being flippant, that he invented Protestantism so he could marry. But I don’t think that stopped many Catholic priests or monks from having sex.

Shelly, oh well done the Scarlet Letter. The book is almost 175 years old. It was finished in 1850. Thank you so much for that. Ellie says, I lived in Zurich for many years. The people are very adamant about their rights and known to be contentious. They don’t like to take orders from high. She goes on. Yet there are cantons that remain totally Catholic, actually more Catholic cantons than Protestant, the Italian speaking canton is Catholic, which you would expect. Not all of it. Inner Switzerland is Catholic. We know that because they had different holidays. Yes. Oh, that’s a problem. When you go to Switzerland, not only is the problem, you can’t afford to buy a coffee because it’s so expensive, but you also don’t know when the public holidays are. You have to work out whether you are in a Catholic or Protestant part of the country.

Barbara. Oh, Barbara says, simply says, thanks to the point about Protestantism and thinking for yourself. Yet, I mean, it’s, yeah, it is. And yet Protestantism can be not thinking for yourself, but to do with somebody like Calvin tells you. So nothing is ever, ever quite straightforward in history. There’s always ifs and buts. Oh yeah.

So Gerald, really interesting coming from South Africa where Calvinism is so influential. I.e., the Dutch, the Dutch-reformed church. Reformed is a key word like Presbyterian to mean Calvinist. So the Dutch Reform church is Calvinist. But I find it interesting as Protestants, starting as democratic becomes so narrow and prescriptive, yes. You see exactly that in South Africa, Dutch reform church becomes a very negative, very conservative, very inward looking church. And that is true. It will take longer, I think. Well, it’s certainly longer than I’ve got now to explain why parts of Protestantism go off into an extreme form. But then many of you who are Jewish might feel that the same sort of argument are had in Judaism as in Protestantism.

Oh, Margaret. Most in, sorry, that’s just a nice comment. There are very many people who do not understand the difference between Catholics, Protestant, that both are Christian. I’ve had to explain this umpteen times. Well, to me the importance is not the important step out theology. I don’t think theology was ever except that some of the sort of intellectuals on both sides, the issue has always been a political one.

And who is this? Michael? Years ago I had a Jewish friend student teaching in a rural school in Wisconsin. Come Christmas times we asked the students to raise their hands if they were Christians, only half the students raised their hands puzzled. She knew that they weren’t Jewish. It turned out that they were Catholics and did not consider themselves Christian. I think that is very much an American thing, Michael. You wouldn’t find that here in Europe. It is when minorities are oppressed or think they’re oppressed.

Bernard says what we’ve just been talking about, about the Dutch reform church and Calvinism, and I’ve emphasised the word reformed and Calvinism and Presbyterian and Calvinism.

Q: During the war, did German speaking French speaking cantons take sides for national reason?

A: Ah, oh, oh, I think you mean the Civil War? No, Michael, Sorry. Oh, it’s Michael. Michael. Sorry Michael. No, basically it was a Catholic cantons against Protestant. It was more religious than it was anything else. It wasn’t economic. And that may be why they were able to come to a easy conclusion afterwards. No, no one was ruling Switzerland and they weren’t elected. Switzerland was cantons. And they are governed in a Republican manner, Canton by Canton, like the council in Geneva. Yes.

No, you are right, Mark. There were, and I did mention there were others. But what I’m saying is, in my view, it’s the agreement at the end of the Capitol Wars, which sets the tone. And there are breaches in that, as with the peasant war, which was not religious. And you are absolutely right. There are, but it is not something that, I would argue it is not something that diverts the course of Swiss history. You probably disagree and we’ll agree to differ.

Rita. No, you are absolutely right. I can’t comment on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. There is a book in English called “The Religion and the Rise of Capitalism”, which is easier to understand than Deborah’s book. I have read Deborah’s book. I find it quite difficult. But that yes, yes, there is a link obviously between Protestant and capitalism. Think the Dutch, think the English. But there’s challenges to that, there’s academic challenges because of Spain and Portugal in the 16th century. But it is a reason why I said that Protestant and Judaism have very much in common and capitalism is one of those.

Michelle, hopefully soon act’s idea of a national curriculum will include history despite Brexit, it won’t do any harm to have a good basic group of European history, not to mention the rest of the world. I give up on British governments interfering with educators on history. They will only want their type of history. Don’t get me started. And as for the Secretary State for education in Britain, I’m literally speechless.

Q: Oh, how does the Swiss Guard?

A: You are absolutely right somebody, I love it when one person asks the question, before I can answer it, I see someone else’s answer.

Q: How does the Swiss Guard tie into the Vatican, started off as mercenaries. Remember that Zwingli spoke against, was it Zwingli or Calvin?

A: I can’t remember that. It spoke against, Zwingli, Spoke against mercenaries. The Swiss were always hiring themselves out as mercenaries.

Rita, bless you, Marilyn. The Huguenots brought wine making to the Cape in South Africa, in the Western Cape. There’s a memorial to the Huguenots. Yeah. The French who brought it and Cecil Rhodes brought apples, Cape apples. Didn’t, a lot of Protestants flee to Amsterdam in the 16th century for tolerance. A lot of English Puritans fled to the Netherlands, not necessarily to Amsterdam, to Lou. That, for instance, had a big English contingent.

So yes, you are right, Shelly. Holland represented a place you could go to. Who is it? Leon? Recently travelling in Hungary, we were told that Catholic churches have a cross and Protestant churches have a rooster on the spire. Well, I’ve never heard that. It certainly isn’t true in Britain. I’ve really no idea about that. It might be a Hungarian thing, but I’m sorry, I simply don’t know that.

Oh, Ross says Bevey is a tiny town. Pretty village almost, I would say. Yeah. It is a lovely place to go to. Well, we enjoyed it. Joan says she spent a summer in Bevey.

Oh yeah, Joan. Well that’s a very nice reference, Joan. If you want a humorous take on Lutherans in America, listen to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days.

If, Irene, you are interested in the English exiles, it’s on my blog. The book is called The King’s Revenge, and it’s written by Jordan and Walsh. Don Jordan. Michael Walsh, Irene, has written the book The King’s Revenge. It’s on my blog and it tells the whole story. I think it’s very interesting story. There’s also the novel by Robert Harris of the two who fled to America. We don’t actually know what their fate was. It’s fiction, but it’s brilliant. Is that not called Act of Oblivion? Somebody will remind me what it’s called. I think it’s called Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris, the fiction writer. It’s a fantastic read. Oh yes. Ha.

Adrian has already put it on thank you, and I got it right, Robert Harris’s latest book Act of Oblivion. It’s a really good, interesting read about Regicides. Why was Cromwell so nasty to the Irish? Because they were Catholics and you have to disentangle all of that because they were Catholics, because they supported the King. And when he’s accused of gross acts of terror, you have to take it in the light of the rules of war in the 17th century. If people don’t surrender when they’re asked to then, but he also lost control of the troops. So that’s a long story for another day.

Henry. Oh, thank you Henry.

Oh, Nanette, thanks. Oh, Nanette’s interesting. What an interesting comment. Nanette’s given thanks. I learned many things I did not learn at school in Switzerland and Rita agrees with me. I find there’s tech difficult as well. Well, I was meant to be. I find all member’s writings. I’m not difficult, if you read religion and the rise of capitalism, then that is an easier book to follow and understand. Thank you very much indeed. The questions were, as I said they would be, easier to answer than what is a formula for a good marriage. I’ll leave you with that question. You can argue with your opposite half all night long, all day long. Thanks for listening. Next week, I think a fascinating subject neutrality because it raises all sorts of questions about what we mean by neutral in World War I and World War II. So thanks for listening. See you next week.