and thus he launched into the world that doctrine of "Cujus regio ejus religio" which a few months later, at the Diet of Spires, became (and for so long) the basis of German policy.

His theory of repression was full-grown; yet for long he shrank, like Augustine, from crowning it with the death penalty. But his theory, like Augustine's, proved more potent than his scruples; and when, in 1529, at that other Diet of Spires where was born the "Protest" (a protest, let us remember, not for the subject's freedom to choose, but for his sovereign's to prescribe), the Lutherans joined their Romanist colleagues in a law of death against the Separatists, Luther himself held back no longer.15 From 1530 he was urging on his fellow-reformers its stern enforcement against the Anabaptists; and, could his word have had its way-his word, I say, for the great heart of the man was always more tolerant than his head-every Zwinglian (and, by the same token, later every Calvinist) would in Lutheran lands have shared their fate.16

15 Already by the summer of 1528, replying to another appeal from the Nurembergers, his hesitation was only lest the example might be followed by the heretics themselves. See his letter to Link, July 14, 1528. This letter has been much misdated; but to the student who has followed the development of Luther's attitude, the later dates suggested are impossible. The passage is clearly an answer to precisely the same question that was addressed also to the Swabian reformer, Brenz, and drew forth from him that noble plea for tolerance which continued to be of use long after its author had receded from it. This reply of Brenz, too, has been misdated, and even the learned Bibliographia Brentiana of Köhler knows only the date of its first printing (October 21, 1528). From a contemporary manuscript acquired by me for Cornell University I am happy to supply the date of writing-"1528, im siebenden tag dess Heumonats" (July 7, 1528).

16 It was in the form of a commentary on the 82d Psalm that in the spring of 1530, at the instance of his Nuremberg friends, he published to the world his ripened views. They are tersely summarized by his amanuensis, Veit Dietrich, in an abstract sent to Spengler: "Heretics are of two sorts-some against religion only, not against government. As to those who sin against government, like the Anabaptists, they should unquestionably be punished by the government as seditious, and sharply. As to those sinning against religion only, as now the Sacramentarians or the Papists, they too must not be tolerated: first because, if in a state are those who teach conflicting things, occasion will be given for crowds and tumults, and this the government should avoid; secondly, if the government knows who teach contrary to religion, they should not be tolerated, lest they infect with foreign sins; thirdly, blasphemers must not be tolerated, and everybody of this sort is a blasphemer." (Haussdorff, Lebens-Beschreibung Spenglers, p. 192, note.) As printed, Luther's commentary does not so explicitly charge papists and Zwinglians with blasphemy. Manifest blasphemy is it to teach against a recognized article of the faith, clearly grounded in Scripture and believed by all Christendom, such as children are taught in the Creed as to teach that Christ is not God or that he did not die for our sins or to deny the resurrection and eternal life or hell. But all unauthorized religious teachers he I would silence or hand over to "Master Hans"-the executioner. For, even though tyrants should in turn punish Lutherans for heresy and blasphemy, the

Thus, as to persecution, Lutheranism in its first ten years had reached much the same point as the primitive church in its first five hundred. Yet not quite. Though in Lutheran lands men and women might now suffer death for precisely the same offense known elsewhere as heresy, it was under the name, not of heresy, but of sedition or of blasphemy. So much, at least, was due to Luther's consistency with his earlier utterances. And it was much; for in it lay serious surrender of that old medieval theory of the sovereignty of God.

But the brilliant young French refugee who in 1536 worked out in the seclusion of a Swiss attic, and not alone for his French fatherland, but for all Christendom, his text-book of the divine legislation, had no such hampering traditions; nor need he fear from his welltutored heart interference with the conclusions of his head. Jurist by training, as well as theologian, John Calvin was Augustinian to the core; and well he knew that the political system envisaged by these new Institutes of his was that of the State of God. And that old free city of the Holy Roman Empire where a strange providence soon planted him as adviser, as spiritual head, at last as autocrat, was almost as ideally unhampered for her task. For Geneva knew now no emperor save the Heavenly, and His majesty alone need be the object of her care. When in 1553 there strayed within her walls that fugitive arch-heretic it must have seemed to those who shared the spirit of their leader a God-given occasion to show forth how universal was her Master's realm. Michael Servetus was no citizen of hers, nor had he committed any crime within her borders. It was against all precedent and in defiance of the claims of those French courts from which he fled that she assumed to try him. And when, for high treason to the God of Heaven, she doomed him to the death of fire, it was under no Genevan statute, but the old imperial laws of Theodosius and of Frederick. The Augustinian State of God, reaching her arm adown the centuries, found in that assertion of her monarch's earthly sovereignty her culminating moment. All that followed was reaction.

Calvin's error, say his modern sons in their inscription on the stone which they have erected on the spot where stood the stake of Servetus, was the error of his age. Last summer they deepened that inscription. That does not make it true. Were it true, who like John Calvin shaped the opinions of that age? But true I can not find it. No other can be shown to have gone, even in theory, so far as he; and though, in that time when men must stand to

commandment that false prophets be stoned must be neither annulled nor obscured. Yet it is only the culprit who can neither be expelled nor silenced whom Luther would hand over to the executioner.

gether, his fellow leaders of Protestantism stood loyally by him, none went so far again. Even from their ranks came protest; and in the ranks which up to now had found no suffrage in the State of God, the ranks of Christian laymen, there began a murmur which has not yet died out. Only those who have given study to the origins of modern liberty in Church and State know in what multitudinous ways the great movements which were to secularize and free the age that followed may be traced to the protest stirred by that reincarnation of the medieval State of God.1

Yet this is to see but half. That such protest could be was only because already to multitudes of quiet thinking men that drama at Worms had meant, not, as to Luther, a loyalty to the truth of God, whose official mouthpiece he might now become, but loyalty to the God of truth, who needs no longer an official mouthpiece-was only because to multitudes who now, from near or far, looked on at that Genevan drama the State of God which Augustine had taught to Calvin had brought not patient citizenship alone, but inspiration to visions of their own, and now beyond the flame-lit skies that showed its pettiness their peering sight discerned a nobler vista for the sons of God. And I doubt if anywhere the Middle Ages found a surer ending.

But that we should make our Middle Ages end there I have not meant to urge. That, thus viewed, the "Middle Ages" have still

17 It has often been urged that even the mild Melanchthon" approved the burning of Servetus. So he did; and Nicolaus Paulus has given himself the pains (Protestantismus und Toleranz, pp. 73-78) to prove that many times he did so. Melanchthon was, in truth, after his early experience with Zwickau prophets, a lifelong leader in the repression of religious error; and despite the doubts of Paulus and of Wappler, I believe that as to this it was he who led Luther, rather than Luther him. But what Paulus fails to point out is that, in his every utterance as to the burning of Servetus, no matter to whom addressed, he makes his approval hinge on the blasphemy of the Spaniard. And, even while Paulus was writing (1911), a new volume of the Supplementa Melanchthoniana (Abt. II., Teil 1) brought fresh testimony to Melanchthon's point of view: a body of topics for discussion by his students, drawn up by him in 1553, includes the thesis that "heretics are not to be punished with death", and in the outline for its treatment suggests the argument that those who are justly so punished, as were the authors of the Peasant War and the Anabaptists, "are not heretics merely, and not alone by their opinions but also by other offenses violate the extreme commands of God" (non tantum opinionibus, sed etiam aliis delictis extrema Dei mandata violant). It is of course only as to the penalty for heresy and the theory underlying the penalty that I thus count Calvin severer than Melanchthon or Luther. How central in Calvin's theology and polity was the sovereignty of God has been demonstrated afresh by Gisbert Beyerhaus in his Studien zur Staatsanschauung Calvins (Berlin, 1910). He too finds the ideas of Calvin and his fellow-reformers as to the state "a revival of medieval theocratic views". How far from unanimous were the contemporaries in applauding the execution of Servetus, and how much less so the lay than the clerical, has been best shown by Buisson in his Sébastien Castellion (Paris, 1892); but there is more to be told.

some warrant as a period, I trust I may have shown. But such a period, even if justified, can be so only for Christendom-only, perhaps, for Latin Christendom-and, even for Latin Christendom, it is but a single phase of the infinitely complex life of men. What I have meant to urge is only that in history our periods, if they are to be intelligible, must overlap. All hail to those who save our thought from petrifaction by coining us fresh nomenclatures from ever varying points of view.

GEORGE L. BURR.

THE COURT OF STAR CHAMBER 1a

THE Court of Star Chamber won enough prominence and enough odium in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to obtain formal abolition by act of Parliament in 1641. It has left its name to later times as a synonym for secrecy, severity, and the wresting of justice. It was the subject of much contemporary description and discussion and indications of its activity meet us at every turn in the records of that period. It has also been described by several modern writers. Yet contemporary writers were interested principally in the technicalities of its procedure and modern scholars have devoted themselves largely to the difficult questions of its origin and authority. Common knowledge therefore remains relatively inadequate and inaccurate. It has gained a name for secrecy whereas its sessions were open practically to all comers. Its action is generally supposed to have been tyrannical and irregular, yet its procedure was quite as formal as that of any other court of equity. It is frequently thought of as in some way exceptional, yet no branch of the government was more clearly an outgrowth of the period in which it flourished.

The object of this paper is therefore to describe in the light of the abundant records in existence the Court of Star Chamber during the seventy-five years in which its place and time of meeting, its constitution, functions, and procedure were all well settled, and to point out its connection with the life of that period.

Star Chamber, the building in which this court sat and from which it took its name was one of that confused group of halls, court-rooms, galleries, chambers, passageways, and chapels that grew up in the course of centuries about the old palace of Edward the Confessor at Westminster. It was built in 1347 and was known from the time of its first construction by the name of Star Chamber, Starred Chamber, or as it appears more commonly in the French and Latin records of that time, la chaumbre esteillée, la chambre des esteilles, or camera stellata.1 It was just such a building as the Painted Chamber, the White Hall, the King's Oratory, St. Stephen's Chapel, the Bell Tower, or any of the other parts of the old complex

1a A paper read at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, December 30, 1912.

1 W. P. Baildon, Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, from the MS. of John Hawarde, pp. xlii-xlvi, 453-464.

AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XVIII.-49. (727)