Still, in spite of conciliar anathemas, there was, after an interval, a certain amount of liberality in granting dispensations for marriage. A collection of decrees of the congregation of the Inquisition contains a number of examples of these, issued between 1600 and 1630 to subdeacons and deacons and members of the military Orders, not only for prospective marriages, but for those already consummated, including the legitimation of the offspring. The most prominent instance is one of 18 December, 1625, to Archduke Leopold of Austria, who as subdeacon held the bishoprics of Strassburg and Passau. He promptly resigned the sees, and in 1626 married Claudia de' Medici, widow of Federigo, Duke of Urbino. The numerous cases of members of the religious Orders, of both sexes, who left their houses and contracted marriage among heretics, subsequently seeking return to the Church, illustrates the confusion of the period, while the benignity with which their supplications were admitted indicates how impotent was the Holy See to enforce the rules amid the exigencies of the struggle between orthodoxy and heresy in the lands remaining under the Roman obedience.1

In Spain, as may readily be conceived, there was no such benignity. Bishop Simancas, about the middle of the sixteenth century, quotes authorities who held that a priest or religious who married publicly was subject to the Inquisition, as this manifested heretical belief, while, if the marriage was secret, it implied no intellectual error, and he was to be dealt with by his superiors; but Simancas asserts that both cases implied heresy, and the Inquisition had jurisdiction. The Inquisition took the same view, and its name inspired a terror discouraging to

1 Decreta Sac. Congr. S. Officii, pp. 84-140 (Bibl. del R. Archivio di Stato in Roma, Fondo Camerale, Congr. del S. Off. vol. iii.).

a Simancæ, de Catholicis Institutis, Tit. XL, n. 8–13.

aspirants to clerical matrimony. Still, its records show that occasionally there were those who dared the risk, trusting to escape detection, and for them the usual penalties were deprivation of functions and benefice, and a longer or shorter term of service in the galleys.1

1 See the author's History of the Inquisition of Spain, vol. iv. p. 336.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE POST-TRIDENTINE CHURCH

THE great council, on which so long had hung the hopes of the Christian world, had at last been held. The reformation of the Church, postponed by the skilful policy of the popes, had been reached in the closing sessions, and had been hurriedly provided for. As we have seen, the regulations which concerned the morals of the clergy were sufficient for their purpose, if only they could be enforced, yet as they were but the hundredth repetition of an endeavour to conquer human nature, which had always previously failed, even those who enacted them could have felt little faith in their efficacy. August Baumgartner, the Bavarian ambassador, in his address to the council, 27 June, 1562, had alluded to the prevailing belief that any comprehensive effort to enforce the chastity required by the canons would result in driving the mass of the Catholic clergy over to Protestantism.1 Since continence was held by them to be impossible, it was thought that they would prefer to marry their concubines as Lutherans rather than give them up as Catholics. Possibly the fear of such untoward result may explain the slender effect which can be discerned from a scheme of reform so laboriously reached and so pompously heralded as the panacea for the woes which were destroying the Church.

Although Catherine de Medicis and her sons refused to allow the council to be formally published in France,

1 Le Plat, Monument. Concil. Trident. V. 340.

yet she permitted its decrees to be freely circulated, and her bishops were at liberty to adopt them as the code of discipline in their dioceses.1 In Germany we have seen how the Catholic princes, secular and ecclesiastical, accepted it at the Diet of Augsburg in 1566. Philip II., after some hesitation, ordered the reception of the council in all his dominions, which extended from Naples to the North Sea; and Poland, despite some opposition from an ambitious prelate, submitted to it before the year 1564 was ended.3

As an authoritative exposition of the law of the Church of Christ, conceived and elaborated under the influence of the Holy Ghost, and commanded for implicit observance by the Vicegerent of God; as the expression of the needs and wants of the Catholic faith, wrought by the concentrated energy and wisdom of the leading doctors of Christendom, and transmitted for practical application through the wondrous machinery of the Catholic hierarchy, it should have had an immediate influence on the evils which it was intended to eradicate. Those evils had confessedly done much to create and foster the schism under which the Church was reeling; their magnitude was admitted by all, and no one ventured to defend or to palliate them. Their removal was acknowledged to be a

1 The Council of Trent has never been received in France. For a résumé of the efforts made to obtain its adoption and their uniform lack of success, see Chavart, Le Célibat des Prêtres, pp. 507-12.

2 In August 1564 Philip II. had ordered its publication in the Low Countries, but Margaret of Parma had hesitated to obey in consequence of the intense opposition excited by its interference with local liberties and franchises, as it completed and crowned the centralising policy which rendered the papacy supreme over all local Churches. It was not until 18 December, 1565, that it was finally promulgated, under imperative commands from Philip. It is characteristic of Philip's habitual double-dealing, however, that while his public orders commanded the reception of the Council without exception, he secretly reserved the rights of himself and his subjects (Le Plat, Concil. Trident. VII. Præf. p. vi.).

3 By a bull dated 18 July, 1564, Pius IV. fixed 1 May, 1564, as the time when the Tridentine canons became the law of the Church. His letter to the Archbishop of Bremen, with an official copy and directions as to its promulgation, is dated October 3 of the same year (Hartzheim, VII. 25).

necessity of the gravest character, and every adherent of Catholicism was bound to lend his aid to the good work. What, then, was accomplished by the council which had for so long a period laboured ostensibly with the object of restoring Latin Christianity to its primitive purity?

To few of the long line of popes does the Church owe so much as to St. Pius V. When he ascended the chair of St. Peter, Protestants were looking forward hopefully to the time when the lands of the Roman obedience should shrink to the two peninsulas of Italy and Spain. His pontificate was too brief to show results in checking the progress of revolt, but his resolute purpose to remove the evils that had led to it laid the foundations on which the counter-Reformation was built. It has not come within our scope to consider the abuses and corruption of the Curia which had created, throughout Latin Christendom, a detestation of the Holy See, to be reckoned among the primary causes of Luther's success, but they were inveterate, and to their removal he addressed himself with relentless vigour. That he should show equal solicitude in the harder task of reforming the morals of a dissolute clergy was to be expected, and this he lost no time in attempting, for he recognised how futile were the Tridentine utterances unless they should be unsparingly enforced. Pius IV. had allowed two years to elapse in silence after the dissolution of the council, but Pius V. lost no time, and on 1 April, 1566, issued a brief commanding the Ordinaries of all Churches to execute with vigour the conciliar decrees against concubinary priests.1 Then, as soon as the dangers of the Diet of Augsburg were safely passed, in June he addressed to Maximilian, to Albert of Bavaria, and to the German bishops letters in which, after alluding to the scandalous lives of the clergy as one of the leading causes of heretic success, he prescribed

1 Pii PP. V. Bull, Cum primum, § 12 (Bullar, Roman. II. 191).