In 1647, Charles I of England, all smokes of honour vanished, would be brought to trial as plain Charles Stuart, accused of crimes including complicity in the death of his father and found guilty of treason and murder for persisting in warfare against the parliamentary government established by Oliver Cromwell. As king, in the view of the court, Charles had been “trusted with a limited power to govern by and according to the laws of the land, and not otherwise; and by his trust, oath and office [had been] obliged to use the power committed to him, for the good and benefit of the people, and for the preservation of their rights and liberties” and, with his failure to abide by this trust, his legitimacy and authority had passed into the hands of Parliament, and his resistance was therefore insurrection. Evidence against him included depositions by common soldiers who had seen him or his banner at the scene of a battle. (Cromwell is always named among the commissioners in attendance, though no special prominence seems to have been given him. Nor is there evidence in the record that he spoke.)
Surely Jefferson and his lawyer friends knew the transcript of this famous trial, and were familiar with the kind of language the parliamentary commission employed: “Resolved, That the people are (under God) the original of all just powers…” The Declaration of Independence, with its lengthy indictment of George III, is clearly as much a Calvinist as an Enlightenment document. If monarchy were simply wrong in itself, the character of any particular king would be irrelevant, unless as an instance of the general tendency of power to corrupt. For the American as well as the English revolutionaries, the provocation of tyranny was required to sanctify the claims of those who would act in the name of the people.
The Geneva Bible, first published in 1560, was a very great influence on political thought in England and America. It was the Bible of Shakespeare and Milton, the Bible one hears referred to sometimes as the “breeches” Bible, because its Adam and Eve, unlike the Adam and Eve of the King James Bible, did not have the presence of mind to fashion their fig leaves into “aprons.” The implication is that it was a crude or naive translation, but in fact it is largely identical with the King James Bible, which was published in 1611. Both of them are based on still earlier translations, most notably the work of William Tyndale, who published a New Testament in 1526 and a Pentateuch in 1530. Tyndale was burned at the apparent behest of Henry VIII, who would not approve any translation of the Bible into English.
The great difference is that the copious interpretive notes that fill the margins of the Geneva Bible are gone from the King’s Authorized Version. At Acts 5:29, the Geneva Bible comments, “We ought to obey no man, but so farre foorth as obeying him, we may obey God.” The notes are compiled from commentary by Reform writers including Cauvin, and they are full of seditious sentiments, from a monarchical point of view. They are also scholarly and informative, enormously interesting as background for English and American history and literature into the eighteenth century. Printing of this Bible in England was forbidden, and it was gradually driven out of circulation in England and America by the King James Version, which basks in the legend that it is a masterpiece created by a committee, and enjoys the reputation of having been the great watershed of English-language literature. Now even highly educated people have never seen a Geneva Bible, and, interestingly, it does not occur to them that they have not seen one.
Neither John Calvin nor his Geneva is associated in the collective mind with revolution or with zeal for the rights of the downtrodden, but rather with severity, repression, and persecution. Such were the passions of the times, and so cataclysmic and transforming their consequences, that every major figure on every side was demonized and also sainted, which greatly complicates the problems of history. Characterizations of Calvinist Geneva are only meaningful relative to the standards of the time, and relative to reasonable expectation. Pluralism was not a value of late medieval and early Renaissance Europe, the period of the Inquisitions, of the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews from Spain, of the destruction of the Hussites in Bohemia — these centuries were one long, fierce purge. I know of no reason to consider Geneva severe at all by the norms that prevailed around it.
Judicial violence — torture and barbarous punishment — was commonplace everywhere; if this is not borne in mind, it is easy to mistake the normal workings of civil law for bizarre manifestations of local pathology. The atmosphere of Geneva was said to be somber, but elsewhere autos-da-fé were gaudy public spectacles. Clearly such judgments reflect individual preferences. Johan Huizinga, in his classic history, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), describes France and Europe in the fifteenth century this way: “It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened world with his black wings.” If there is truth in this, then Geneva in the early sixteenth century can hardly be expected to have put off entirely the dire traits of the larger civilization. Of course Geneva was repressive. The questions to be asked are what the origins of repressiveness were, and whether the influences of republicanism and Calvinism intensified or moderated the harshness of European life as it was lived in Geneva. On one hand, Cauvin, with Farel and Viret and others, did attempt to have all Genevans sign a statement of belief, with the proclaimed but unenforced penalty of banishment from the city for those who refused. On the other hand, when the people of Geneva decided this demand was unacceptable, even though most of them did sign the statement, they could and did banish Cauvin and his friends from the city. Severity so liable to correction hardly deserves the name.
After three years Geneva called Cauvin back again, greeting his return with a public festival. But his relationship with the city never became entirely harmonious. His presence attracted exiles from all over Europe, especially from France, overwhelming the local population with zealous foreigners, many of whom were naturalized as citizens. Cauvin and his supporters seem to have been intent on consolidating a revolution, one in which religion was as central to the imagination of the project as political liberty would be in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and economics and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth. Traditionally European societies instructed their members in approved beliefs through rituals, processions, feasts, fasts, pilgrimages, and iconography. Geneva replaced all that with hour upon hour of sermons and lectures, and a system of education that was compulsory for all children and free for the poor. Cauvin rejected the “old saw that images are the books of the uneducated” remarking, “I confess, as the matter stands, that today there are not a few who are unable to do without such ‘books’… those in authority in the church turned over to idols the office of teaching for no other reason than that they themselves were mute.” If all these lectures and sermons seem a poor exchange for pageants and altarpieces, it is well to remember the Renaissance passion for books, and for the languages and literatures of antiquity, first of all the Bible. Cauvin’s virtuosic scholarship could be thought of as monumental public art, by analogy with the work of contemporaries like Michelangelo.