U.S. History I: United States History 1607-1865 ... - Textbook Equity

The Protestant Reformation in Germany and England
In order to fully understand American history one must have a
grasp of the role that religion has played in the development of
this nation. In fact, the history of religion in the Western world
going back hundreds of years before the discovery of America
has affected this nation down to the present time.
In the early 1500s, Martin Luther became scandalized by the degree
of corruption he observed in the Christian Church. Today we
refer to the church to which Luther first belonged as the Roman
Catholic Church; at that time it was the only church that existed
in the Western world, although Catholicism varied in certain ways
from country to country. For all kinds of reasons stemming the
from the church having wielded extraordinary social and political pressure over the Western
world for more than a thousand years, the corruption touched the lives of many people.
Luther was an extremely pious and devout priest, so much so that even on the day of his
ordination, he was not confident that he was holy enough to be able to conduct his first
mass. It is understandable that a man with serious concerns about his own holiness would
be shocked to discover corruption in an institution he revered. What bothered him more
than anything was the sale of indulgences, by which priests could forgive sins in exchange
for donations of money.
Luther began to collect his complaints and finally delivered them in the form of ninety-five
theses that he nailed on the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg, Germany. To say that his
complaints were timely doesn’t quite capture the impact; within one generation of Martin
Luther’s protest, Protestantism, consisting of a number of Christian sects that had rebelled
against the leadership of the Roman church, had spread over much of northern Europe. As
frequently happens in cases of revolution, after the initial upheaval was complete, the rebellion
fragmented further into various segments. Thus the Protestant Reformation led to the
creation of a variety of churches: Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Calvinist, and many other
varieties. (More than one hundred different Protestant denominations exist in America today.)
Most interesting for American history is the fact that during the time when the Reformation
in Germany was getting underway, a young English prince fell in love with his brother’s widow.
Henry and Arthur were the sons of Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs. Under a
treaty negotiated by Henry VII in 1496, Prince Arthur was betrothed to Catherine of Aragon,
daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. 8 Arthur and Catherine were finally
married in 1501, but soon after the marriage Arthur fell ill and died of tuberculosis. As he
was only 15, it was claimed that his marriage to Catherine was never consummated, a claim
which the widow supported.
Young Prince Henry, now heir to the Tudor throne, was in love with Kathryn and wished to
marry her. At that time, however, it was considered incest for a man to marry his brother’s
widow, so Henry appealed to the Rome to nullify the marriage between Arthur and Catherine
so that he would be free to marry her, on the grounds that Catherine’s marriage to
8 When Ferdinand became king, Aragon and Castile were united into the Kingdom of Spain.
Those were the two monarchs who sent Christopher Columbus on his journey in search of Asia in
1492.
26