A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

countries at least as early as the times of Descartes. There, as elsewhere, the Reformation had been substantially a fiscal or economic revolution, proceeding on various lines. In Denmark the movement, favoured by the king, began among the people; the nobility rapidly following, to their own great profit; and finally Christian III, who ruled both Denmark and Norway, acting with the nobles, suppressed Catholic worship, and confiscated to the crown the "castles, fortresses, and vast domains of the prelates." [1503] In Sweden the king, Gustavus Vasa, took the initiative, moved by sore need of funds, and a thoroughly anti-ecclesiastical temper, [1504] the clergy having supported the Danish rule which he threw off. The burghers and peasants promptly joined him against the clergy and nobles, enabling him to confiscate the bishops' castles and estates, as was done in Denmark; and he finally secured himself with the nobles by letting them reclaim lands granted by their ancestors to monasteries. [1505] His anti-feudal reforms having stimulated new life in many ways, further evolution followed. In Sweden the stimulative reign of Gustavus Vasa was followed by a long period of the strife which everywhere trod on the heels of the Reformation. The second successor of Gustavus, his son John, had married a daughter of the Catholic Sigismund of Poland, and sought to restore her religion to power, causing much turmoil until her death, whereafter he abandoned the cause. His Catholic son Sigismund recklessly renewed the effort, and was deposed in consequence; John's brother Charles becoming king. In Denmark, meanwhile, Frederick II (d. 1588) had been a bigoted champion of Lutheranism, expelling a professor of Calvinistic leanings on the Eucharist, and refusing a landing to the Calvinists who fled from the Netherlands. On the other hand he patronized and pensioned Tycho Brahé, who, until driven into banishment by a court cabal during the minority of Christian IV, did much for astronomy, though unable to accept Copernicanism. In 1611 there broke out between Sweden and Denmark the sanguinary two-years' "War of Calmar," their common religion availing nothing to avert strife. Thereafter Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, as Protestant champion in the Thirty Years' War, in succession to Christian IV of Denmark, fills the eye of Europe till his death in 1632; eleven years after which event Sweden and Denmark were again at war. In 1660 the latter country, for lack of goodwill between nobles and commoners, underwent a political revolution whereby its king, whose predecessors had held the crown on an elective tenure, became absolute, and set up a hereditary line. The first result was a marked intellectual stagnation. "Divinity, law, and philosophy were wholly neglected; surgery was practised only by barbers; and when Frederick IV and his queen required medical aid, no native physician could be found to whom it was deemed safe to entrust the cure of the royal patients.... The only name, after Tycho Brahé, of which astronomy can boast, is that of Peter Horrebow, and with him the cultivation of the science became extinct." [1506]