BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

The Pious/Godless German
Superceding the legacies of ancient, mediaeval and renaissance sources, developments in
the sixteenth century would add an entirely new dimension to the image of Germany in English
minds. Before the Henrician Reformation and Protestant sectarianism established theological
boundaries, the Lutheran Reformation exerted a profound, albeit “heretical,” influence in
England through doors opened by the Lollards, book merchants, and Cambridge scholars who
gathered at the White Horse tavern “Little Germany” to discuss Lutheran doctrines. 38 The image
of Lutheran piety and a Protestantism which “sprang from the heart of the German race and from
that indestructible love of freedom of mind” would survive as a positive virtue of Old Germany
even at the height of the Anglo-German antagonism. 39 But within the span of a single generation
following the Anglican split from Rome in 1534, the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation
became known more as a land of sorcery and diabolism. This shift in viewpoint depended a great
deal on religious fanaticism and superstition in Germany itself, amplified not a little by sectarian
rivalry, anti-Catholicism and its reaction, and by Luther’s own writings about portents and the
omnipresence of the devil in various guises. The worst abuses of this pathological obsession
38 A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 36-37,
68-69. Theology and financial considerations also dictated policy when in 1535 Henry VIII
refused to accept the Confession of Augsburg and Lutheranism as the price of admission to the
Schmalkaldic League (p. 175).
39 “England’s Relations With Germany,” Quarterly Review 183 (April 1896): 547. This
article presented a sympathetic view of German imperial ambitions, from unification to colonial
expansion, even after Kaiser Wilhelm II’s infamous Kruger Telegram of January 1896, although
it preceded Germany’s ambitious naval building program launched in March of 1898.
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