Luther’s attitude towards the lawyers is of special importance from two points of view. It shows afresh the high opinion he entertained of himself, and, at the same time, it reveals his jealousy of any outside influence.

We have also other utterances which testify to his deep distrust of the secular authorities, on account of their real or imaginary encroachments.

He often gives vent to his wounded feelings in unseemly words. A strange mixture of glowing fanaticism and coarse jocularity flows forth like a stream of molten lava from the furnace within him.

The Present and the To-come

On his last birthday, which he kept on Martinmas-Eve, 1545, Luther assembled about him Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, Cruciger, George Major and other guests, and to them opened his mind. According to the account left by his friend Ratzeberger he spoke of the coming dissensions: “As soon as he was gone the best of our men would fall away. I do not fear the Papists, he remarked; they are for the most part rude, ignorant asses and Epicureans; but our own brethren will injure the Evangel because they have gone forth from us but were not of us. This will do more harm to the Evangel than the Papists can.” The sad political outlook of Germany led him to add: “Our children will have to take up the spear, for things will fare ill in Germany.” Of the Catholics he said: “The Council of Trent is very angry and means mischief; hence be careful to pray diligently, for there will be great need of prayer when I am gone.” All, he exhorted “to stand fast by the Evangel.”[1372]

“For it is the command of our stern Lord [the Elector],” he says elsewhere, “that we should maintain undefiled the government of the Church, dispense aright the Word, the Absolution and the Sacraments according to the institution of Christ, and also comfort consciences.”[1373]

The decline of morals, now so obvious, was another phantom that haunted the evening of his days.

Up to the day of his death he was concerned for the welfare of the students at Wittenberg University. Among the 2000 young men at the University (for such was their number in Luther’s last years) there were many who were in bitter want. Luther sought to alleviate this by attacking, even in his sermons, those who were bent on fleecing the young; he not only gave readily out of his own slender means but also wrote to others asking them to be mindful of the students; of this we have an instance in a note he wrote in his later years, in which he asks certain “dear gentlemen” (possibly of the University or the magistracy) for help for a “pious and learned fellow” who would have to leave Wittenberg “for very hunger”; he declares that he himself was ready to contribute a share, though he was no longer able to afford the gifts he was daily called upon to bestow.[1385]

We know how grieved he was at the downfall of the schools and how loud his complaints were of the lawlessness of youth; how it distressed him to see the schools looked down upon though their contribution to the maintenance of the Churches was “entirely out of question.”[1386]

For his University of Wittenberg he requests the prayers of others against those who were undermining its reputation. He sees the small effect of his earnest exhortations to the students against immorality.[1387] The excellent statutes he had laid down for the town and the University were nullified by the bad example of men in high places. “Ah, how bitterly hostile the devil is to our Churches and schools.… Tyranny and sects are everywhere gaining the upper hand by dint of violence.… I believe there are many wicked knaves and spies here on the watch for us, who rejoice when scandals and dissensions arise. Hence we must watch and pray diligently. Unless God preserves us all is up. And so it looks. Pray, therefore, pray! This school [of Wittenberg] is as it were the foundation and stronghold of pure religion.”[1388] He once declared sadly that, among all the students in the town there were scarcely two from whom something might be hoped as future pastors of souls. “If out of all the young men present here two or three honest theologians grow up then we should have reason to thank God! Good theologians are indeed rare birds on this earth. Among a thousand you will seldom find two, or even one. And indeed the world no longer deserves such good teachers, nor does it want them; things will go ill when I, and you and some few others are gone.”[1389]

“The world was like this before the flood, before the destruction of Sodom, before the Babylonian captivity, before the destruction of Jerusalem—and so again it is before the fall of Germany.… Should you, however, ask what good has come of our teaching, answer me first, what good came of Lot’s preaching in Sodom?”[1390]

To divert his thoughts from these saddening cares he often turned to Æsop. It is of interest to note how highly he always prized Æsop’s Fables, not merely as a means of education for the young in the elementary schools, but even as furnishing a stimulating topic for conversation with his friends.

He was very determined in putting down scandals when they occurred in his own home. A young relative, who was addicted to drunkenness, he took severely to task, pointing out the good example, which in the interests of the Evangel his household was strictly bound to give; when the maidservant, Rosina, whom he had taken into his house, turned out a person of bad life, he could not sufficiently express his indignation and dismissed her from the family. A similar case also occurred at the time of his flight from Wittenberg in July, 1545; he writes to Catherine in the letter in which he tells her of his intention of not returning: “If Leck’s ‘Bachscheisse,’ our second Rosina and deceiver, has not yet been laid by the heels, do what you can that the miscreant may feel ashamed of herself.”[1394]

Catherine Bora was a good helper in matters of this sort. In fact she performed with zeal and assiduity the duties that fell to her lot in tending the aged and infirm man, and looking after the house and the small property. Amidst his many and great difficulties he often confessed that she was a comfort to him, and gratefully acknowledges her work. In his letters to her during his later years he writes in so religious a strain, and in such heartfelt language, that the reader might be forgiven for thinking that Luther had entirely succeeded in forgetting the irreligious nature of the union between a monk and a nun. “Grace and peace in the Lord,” he writes in a letter from Eisleben of Feb. 7, 1546, to his “housewife.” “Read, you dear Katey, John and the Smaller Catechism, of which you once said: All that is told in this book applies to me. For you try to care for your God just as though He were not Almighty and could not make ten Dr. Martins should the old one be drowned in the Saale, etc. Leave me in peace with your cares, I have a better guardian than even you and all the angels.”[1395]

3. Luther’s Death at Eisleben (1546)

In March, 1545, there was sent to Luther by Philip of Hesse an Italian broadside purporting to have been printed in Rome, and containing a fearsome account of Luther’s supposed death. In it “the ambassador of the King of France” announces that Luther had wished his body set up on the altar for adoration; also that before he died he had received the Body of Christ, but that the Host had hovered untouched over the grave after the funeral; a diabolical din had been heard coming from the grave, but, on opening it, it was found to be empty though it emitted a murderous stench of brimstone. Luther at once published the narrative with an half-ironical, half-indignant commentary. He sought to persuade the people that the Pope had actually wished for his death and damnation. In a poem which he prefixed to the pamphlet he tells the Pope in his usual style that: his life was indeed the Pope’s plague, but that his death would be the Pope’s death too; the Pope might choose which he liked best, the plague or death.—About the real origin of this alleged Italian production nothing is known.[1396]

In his bodily sufferings and anxiety of mind concerning the present and the future of his life’s work Luther frequently spoke of his desire for a speedy release by death. His words on this subject throw a strong light on his frame of mind.

In Jan., 1546, Luther set out for the third time for Mansfeld, in order to settle the business of Count Albert of Mansfeld; only as a corpse was he to return home.

The Elector did not look with approval on Luther’s arduous labours as peacemaker, while Chancellor Brück even went so far as to characterise the Counts’ interminable lawsuits about the mines and the rest as a “pig-market.” Luther, nevertheless, set out again on Jan. 23, regardless of his already impaired health, betaking himself this time to Eisleben. He was accompanied by his three sons, their tutor and his famulus Aurifaber, the editor of the German Table-Talk. At Halle they were detained three days in the house of Jonas on account of the floating ice and the flooded state of the Saale. “We did not wish to take to the water and tempt God,” so he wrote to Catherine on Jan. 25, “for the devil bears us a grudge and also dwells in the water; and, moreover, ‘discretion is the best part of valour’; nor is there any need for us to give the Pope and his myrmidons such cause for delight.”[1407]

On the 26th Luther preached a sermon in which, with all the strength at his command, he poured forth his anger against Popery, “which had cheated and befooled the whole world.” “The Pope, the Cardinals and the lousy, scurvy, mangy monks have hoaxed and deluded us.” He proceeded to storm against the unfortunate monks who had dared to remain in a town now almost entirely won over to the innovations: “I am above measure astonished that you gentlemen of Halle can still tolerate amongst you these knaves, the crawling, lousy monks.… These wanton, verminous miscreants take pleasure only in folly.… You gentlemen ought to drive the imbecile, sorry creatures out of the town.… What we teach and preach we do not teach as our own words, discovered or invented by us, like the visions of the monks which they preach; their lies are like bulging hop-pockets or sacks of wool.”[1408]

On the 28th, after having been joined by Jonas, Luther and his companions crossed the swollen Saale. On this occasion he said to Jonas: “Dear Dr. Jonas, wouldn’t it be a fine thing were I, Dr. Martin, my three sons and you to be all drowned!” Not far from Eisleben they were overtaken by a cold wind which brought the traveller in the carriage to such a state of weakness and breathlessness that he nearly fainted. “The devil always plays me this trick,” so he consoled himself, “when I have something great on hand.”[1409]

At Eisleben he took up his abode with the town-clerk, and soon got well enough to take part in the negotiations; he visited the several families of the Counts and amused himself in his hours of leisure by looking at the young nobles and their ladies tobogganing.[1410] To Catherine he wrote jestingly on Feb. 1, that his fit near Eisleben was the work of the Jews, numbers of whom lived there (at Rissdorf); they had raised up a bitter wind against him, which “penetrated the back of the carriage and passed right through my cap into my head, and tried to turn my brain to ice. This may have brought on the fainting; now, however, thank God, I am quite well, were it not for the pretty women, etc.” (cp. above, vol. iii., p. 281). He extols the Naumburg beer, which suits him well, says that his three sons have gone on to Jena and alludes to the blow he was planning against the Mansfeld Jews, on whom Count Albert frowned and whom he was determined to abandon.[1411]

When Catherine again expressed fears about his health he replied in a joking vein on Feb. 10, giving her an account of all that her anxious thoughts had brought upon him: The fire that broke out just in front of his door had almost burnt him up, the plaster that fell from the ceiling of his room had almost killed him, “having a mind to verify your pious fears if the dear and holy angels had not been watching over me. I fear, if you don’t put your fears to rest, the earth will finally open and swallow us up.… We are, thank God, well and sound.“[1412]

In the interval, while the negotiations were still proceeding, he had dealt very rudely with the Jews in a sermon on Feb. 7, in spite of the fact that the Countess of Mansfeld, Solms’s widow, was said to be in their favour. He was displeased to see them left unmolested. “No one lifts a finger against them.” In a manuscript “exhortation against the Jews,” written at that time,[1413] he briefly sums up his wishes: “You Lords ought not to tolerate them, but rather drive them out,” at least if they refuse to become Christians. Not long before he had declared that, with his own hands, he could put a Jew to death who dared to blaspheme Christ; when writing to Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg he also praised one of his partisans, a certain provost, simply and solely for his hatred of the Jews: “The provost pleases me beyond measure because he is so strong against the Jews.”[1414]

Altogether, Luther preached four sermons at Eisleben. Twice he went to the Supper, so we are told, after having previously received “Absolution.” On the second occasion “he ordained” two priests,[1415] his friend’s account narrates, “in the apostolic way.” Every evening he assembled his friends about him, the chief being Justus Jonas and the Eisleben preacher, Michael Cœlius. In their company he showed a good temper, much as the long-drawn, tedious negotiations annoyed him. He put it down to the devil that the scheme of settlement drawn up by expert lawyers, encountered so much opposition on both sides; indeed he fancied that all the devils had gathered together at Eisleben to mock at his efforts in this dreary business. He would fain have himself played the poltergeist among the combatants, to “grease the wheels of the lazy coach” and “bring them back at last to some sense of the duty of Christian charity.”[1416] The reader will remember the apparition that Luther thought he saw in those days.[1417] At last, on Feb. 14, he was able to write to his “dear, kind housewife”: “God has shown us great mercy here, for, through their solicitors, the Lords have settled almost everything save two or three points.”[1418] These outstanding matters were satisfactorily adjusted shortly afterwards.

In the same letter Luther said: “We hope, please God, to return home this week.” Thus he scarcely expected to die yet, but still hoped to be able to get back to Wittenberg before the end came. “Here we eat and drink like lords,” so he assures his Catherine, “and are very well looked after.”[1419] On Feb. 16, at table, when the talk turned on sickness and death, Luther said: “When I get home to Wittenberg I shall at once lay myself in my coffin and give the grubs a nice fat doctor to feed on.”[1420] For all his weakness his cheerfulness had not left him.

New cares were now troubling his mind. He had learnt how the Kaiser was insisting on submission to the Council, how the religious conference at Ratisbon had been a failure, and had merely given the Imperial forces time to arm themselves for an attack on the Schmalkalden Leaguers. The coming defeat of the League at Mühlberg was already casting its shadow. “May God help His Highness our Master” (the Elector), remarked Luther; “he is in for a bad time.”[1421] His annoyance with Kaiser Charles led him to say: The “Emperor is dead against us, and now he is showing the hand he so long had concealed.”[1422]

Luther, however, was not to live to see the blow delivered which the flouted Imperial power had so long been threatening.

“During those three weeks” Luther frequently left the supper-table with the admonition to “pray for our Lord God [i.e. for His cause][1423] that it may go well with His Churches; the Council of Trent is highly wroth.”

Holy Scripture, to which he had always devoted himself with so much energy, even now engrossed him. He felt keenly its obscurity and depth. The last short note he made was on the Book of Books and the difficulty of reaching its innermost meaning. After instancing the difficulty of rightly understanding even Virgil or Cicero, it proceeds: “Let no one think he has sufficiently tasted Holy Scripture, unless, for a hundred years, he has ruled the Churches with prophets such as Elias, Eliseus, John the Baptist, Christ and the Apostles.”[1424] By this significant admission he had of course no intention of repudiating the principle, whereby in the stead of the teaching authority of the Church he had put the written Word of God as the clear and final rule for each individual. At this time, just before his death, he was less inclined than ever to retract one jot of his doctrine. Nevertheless the fact that he himself was compelled to admit in such terms the depth and the difficulty of the Bible seems scarcely to bear out his usual contention, viz. that Holy Scripture is the one and all-sufficient guide and master for all.

On Feb. 17, the first symptoms showed themselves of the attack which was to carry him off before the next dawn.[1425] During the day he was very restless; once he said: “Here at Eisleben I was baptised, how if I were to remain here?” In the evening he felt the oppression on the chest of which he had had to complain in previous illnesses; he therefore had himself rubbed down with hot flannels and, as soon as he felt better, went off to supper. During the meal he was, as usual, talkative and in good humour; he told some humorous anecdotes and also spoke of more serious things, and ate and drank heartily. He casually said that, were he to die as a man of sixty-three, he would have attained a quite respectable age, “for people do not now live to be very old. Well, we old men must live so long in order to be able to look behind the devil [i.e. learn his wickedness] and experience so much malice, faithlessness and misery in the world that we may bear witness what a wicked spirit the devil is.” With the pessimism peculiar to him he concludes: “The human race is like the sheep being led to the slaughter.”

According to Ratzeberger, the Elector’s medical adviser, who collected the latest particulars concerning Luther, the latter, on the evening of the 17th, “when about to lie down to sleep after supper,” wrote “with a piece of chalk on the wall the verse: In life, O Pope, I was thy plague, in dying I shall be thy death” (cp. above, vol. iii., p. 435). If we may trust this account, then, on this occasion Luther again used the words which had once before served him under similar circumstances at Schmalkalden. Those actually present at Eisleben make, however, no mention of this, and, in his funeral address, Jonas merely says, that these verses were Luther’s fitting “epitaph” which he had once written for himself. Cœlius also, in his panegyric on Luther, says that though dead he still survives in his books; “he will also after his death, please God, be the death of the Pope, thanks to his writings, just as he was his plague during life.” As no mention of the writing on the wall is made by either of these two, nor yet in the account of his death given by his three friends, though there was no reason for their omitting it, Ratzeberger’s account stands alone and must be taken for what it is worth.[1426]

The following is based principally on the narratives of Jonas, Cœlius and Aurifaber, though the fact that it emanates from enthusiastic friends of Luther’s has not been overlooked. Even though, as is highly probable, the three writers in question made the most of the edifying traits they were able to mention, yet this is no sufficient ground for rejecting their account as a whole. Even the short prayers which they put on Luther’s lips may not be pure inventions.

After supper Luther betook himself rather early to his sitting-room and, as his custom was, said his prayers at the open window. Another severe attack of heart oppression then came on; his friends hurried to his assistance and again tried to mend matters by rubbing him with hot cloths; he was, however, only able to get an hour’s sleep on a sofa in the room. He refused to have the doctors called in as he did not think there was any danger. For the next two or three hours, viz. till 1 a.m. he slept in his own bed in the adjoining bedroom, after telling his anxious friends and his two sons, Martin and Paul, to go to rest. Jonas, the principal witness at his death, had a couch in the same room as Luther.

About one o’clock Luther suddenly felt very unwell. “Oh, my God, how ill I feel,” he said to Jonas, and, getting out of bed, he dragged himself into the sitting-room, saying he would probably die at Eisleben after all, and repeating the prayer: “Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” He complained of an intolerable burden on his chest. Two physicians, one a doctor and the other a master of medicine, were now summoned in haste. Before they arrived the patient seems to have suddenly collapsed; they found him on the sofa, unconscious and with no perceptible pulse. Recovering consciousness he said, all bathed in the cold sweat of death: “My God, I feel so ill and anxious, I am going,” and then, according to Jonas, he said a short prayer of thanks to God for having revealed to him His Son Jesus Christ in Whom he believed and Whom he had preached and confessed, whilst the hateful Pope and all the ungodly had blasphemed this same Christ; thereupon, all trustfully, he commended his soul to the Lord. No less than three times, according to this witness, did he repeat in Latin the familiar Bible text: “God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” This text (John iii. 16) he had, indeed, always esteemed highly, and seen in it the seal of his doctrine. He is also said to have repeated other Bible texts while medicines were being given him. Count Albert and his relatives, who had come in, also offered him various remedies. Soon after he seemed again to lose consciousness. In spite of the confessions just mentioned Jonas and Cœlius shouted once more in his ear the question, whether he remained steadfast in the faith in Christ and His doctrine which he had preached; to which they caught the reply “Yes.” That was his last word.—To all appearance his death was due to an apoplectic seizure.

All things considered, it is very odd that Luther apparently never gave a thought to his life’s partner, whom he had left at Wittenberg, and that, at least as it seems, his sons were not with him at his death. The argument from the silence of his friends on this point is not devoid of force, for it would have been so easy for them to supply what we here miss. Their silence might even be adduced in support of the substantial reliability of their narrative. The best explanation of Luther’s apparent oblivion is probably to be sought in the result of the stroke which stupefied him and blotted out the memory of those dear to him.[1427]

Towards 3 a.m., after drawing a last deep breath. Luther yielded up his soul into the hands of the Judge. This was on Feb. the 18th.

At the demand of both the physicians the apothecary of Eisleben was sent for, either immediately after death had taken place, or possibly just before, to administer a stimulant by means of a clysteral injection. The apothecary, Johann Landau by name, was a Catholic and a convert, a nephew of the convert polemic Wicel. He drew up a report of his visit which has become famous in the discussion of the question stupidly broached anew of recent years as to whether Luther committed suicide.[1428] We here give the principal passages of his very realistic narrative. He speaks of himself in the third person.

“The apothecary was awakened at the third hour after midnight.… When he arrived he said to the doctors: ‘He is quite dead, of what use can an injection be?’ Count Albert and some scholars were present. The physicians, however, replied: ‘At any rate have a try with the instrument that he may come again to himself if there be any life yet in him.’ When the apothecary inserted the nozzle he noticed some flatulency given off into the ball of the syringe.”[1429] The apothecary persevered in his efforts until the physicians saw that all was useless. “The two physicians disputed together as to the cause of death. The doctor said it was a fit of apoplexy, for the mouth was drawn down and the whole of the right side discoloured.”[1430] The master, on the other hand, thought it incredible that so holy a man could have been thus stricken down by the hand of God, and thought it was rather the result of a suffocating catarrh and that death was due to choking. After this all the other Counts arrived. Jonas, however, who was seated at the head of the bed, wept aloud and wrung his hands. When asked whether Luther had complained of any pain the evening before he replied: “Dear me, no, he was more cheerful yesterday than he had been for many a day. Oh, God Almighty, God Almighty, etc.”—by this Jonas did not mean to deny the fit of heart oppression that had occurred the previous day, since he himself reports it to the Elector; distracted by grief as he was he probably only thought of the good spirits Luther had been in that evening, and of the contrast with the dead body he now saw lying before him. Or it may be that he did not regard the heart oppression as actual “pain.”

Landau’s report continues: “In the meantime the Counts brought costly scents to be applied to the body of the deceased, for on several occasions before this he had been thought to be dead when he lay for a long time motionless and giving no sign of life, as happened to him, for instance, at Schmalkalden when he was tormented with the stone.… The apothecary vigorously rubbed his nose, mouth, forehead and left side for some time with the oils. Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt came and bent over the corpse and asked the apothecary whether any sign of life remained. The latter, however, replied that there was not the least life in him seeing that the hands, nose, forehead, cheeks and ears were already stiff and cold in death.… Jonas said: It will be best now for us to send a swift rider to the Elector and for one of us to sit down and write and tell him all that has happened.”

Jonas himself wrote this first still extant account to his sovereign “about four o’clock in the morning.”

On Feb. 20 Luther’s body was taken to Halle, and early on the 22nd to Wittenberg, where it was received at the Elster Gate—the scene of the famous burning of the Bull—by the University, the Town Council and the burghers. He was buried in the Schlosskirche. There his bones still rest in the grave as was proved by an examination made on Feb. 14, 1892.[1431]

4. In the World of Legend

Barely twenty years later a report that Luther had committed suicide went the rounds among certain of his opponents, the report being subsequently grounded on the alleged statement of a servant.

The first writer who mentions the servant is the Italian Oratorian, Thomas Bozius, in a book on the marks of the Church printed in Rome in 1591. “Luther after having supped heartily that evening and gone to bed quite content,” so he writes, “died that same night by suffocation. I hear that it has recently been discovered through the confession of a witness who was then his servant and who came over to us in late years, that Luther brought himself to a miserable end by hanging; but that all the inmates of the house who knew of the incident were bound under oath not to divulge the matter, for the honour of the Evangel as it was said.”[1432]

It was not till the beginning of the 17th century that the text of the supposed letter of Luther’s servant began to be circulated, according to which, when the latter went one morning to awaken Luther “as usual” (i.e. about 7 a.m.) he found he had committed suicide; this, however, is quite at variance with the definite accounts we have of the time of death. The supposed servant claims to have been alone when he found “our Master Martin hanging from the bedpost, miserably strangled,” whereas the notes made at the time speak of the presence of witnesses both before and after the death which, moreover, was quite a natural one. The apocryphal letter bears no writer’s name nor do we know anything of its source; it seems to have made its first public appearance at Antwerp in 1606 in the work of the Franciscan Sedulius, who probably took it in good faith. It is remarkable, that, down to 1650, as Paulus has proved, only one German writer mentions this fictitious letter, though foreign polemics were busy with it. Outside of Germany such inventions found more ready credence, particularly among the zealous and more imaginative Catholics of the Latin race, who were only too willing to seize on any tale which was to the discredit of the lives of the German foes of Catholicism.[1433]

The falsehood of the legend of Luther’s suicide was most convincingly proved by N. Paulus in his special work on the subject (1898). This scholar submitted the fable to the sharp knife of criticism with a broadminded love of truth that honours his Catholicism as much as his acumen does honour to him as a critic.

It is barely credible to us to-day what inventions grew up in the 16th century, both on the Catholic and the Protestant side, about the deaths of well-known public men who happened to be the object of animosity to one party or the other. Suicide, or murder at the hands of friend or foe, or, more frequently, dreadful maladies or sudden death under the most horrible shapes were the ordinary penalties assigned to opponents, not only by the populace but even by the more credulous type of learned writers. We must not forget that Luther himself had at hand a list of the persecutors of the Evangel, who, in his own day, had been snatched away by sudden death, and that it served him on occasion in his sermons and writings.[1434]

It is an undeniable fact that Luther did much to pave the way for such stories. His printed Table-Talk could well be taken as a model. Among the fearsome tales of death he himself related was e.g. that of Mutian the humanist, who, refusing to become a Lutheran, fell from poverty into despair and poisoned himself;[1435] of the Archbishop of Treves, Richard of Greiffenklau, who was “bodily carried off to hell by the devil”;[1436] of the Catholic preacher, Urban of Kunewalde, who, “having fallen away from the Evangel,” was “struck by a thunderbolt” in the church, and then again by a flash of lightning that passed through his body from head to foot, because he had asked heaven for a sign to prove that he was in the right,[1437] etc.[1438] “All these perished miserably,” he says, “like senseless swine. And so too it will happen with the others.”[1439]

In those days, partly owing to Luther’s influence, people were very ready to admit the devil’s intervention in the horrible death that befell their foes; the Catholic champions would all seem to have had a shocking end, could we but trust the writers in the Protestant camp.[1440]

Eck they depicted entirely possessed by the devil and “dying like a brute beast, quite out of his mind.” Of Emser (when still living) Luther himself says, that he had been killed suddenly by the “fiery darts and arrows of the devil.”[1441] Cochlæus, according to other writers, was removed from the world in an awful way. Johann Fabri it was said had died in despair, saying to those who exhorted him to have confidence: “Too late, too late.” Pighius was made out to have died by his own hand. Latomus was represented as crying out on his death-bed that he was a devil incarnate and had claws on his fingers and toes. Hofmeister, the learned Augustinian, according to the Protestant version, repeatedly said before dying: “I belong to the devil body and soul.” Of the Jesuits, even their founder, Ignatius of Loyola, had a bad death. Canisius was struck dumb in the pulpit at Worms and was carried off by the judgment of God; some were not wanting, however, who declared that he had been converted to Luther’s doctrine. Seven years before his death, it was reported of Bellarmine, the great controversialist of that day, that “he had died miserably and in despair,” carried off on the back of a fiery he-goat from hell; and “even to this very day,” so it was told during his lifetime, “Bellarmine may be heard gruesomely howling in the wind, astride his flaming, winged steed.”

Needless to say, many of the converts who turned their back on Luther and took the part of the Catholic Church “perished miserably”! “Many of these devil’s henchmen,” writes a “simple minister of the Word,” “who knowingly and of malice aforethought, as they themselves admit, deny the known truth of the Evangel, have been carried off alive by the devil, or have howled before their death like wolves and tigers, as notoriously happened in the case of that firebrand Staphylus.”[1442]

If similar tales, representing in an unfavourable light Luther’s life and death, were equally rife among the Catholics, this can be no matter for surprise if we bear in mind how greatly they were vexed by the exaggerated eulogies passed on him and his life’s work, and how much they had been stung by his polemics and furious onslaught on the Church. Whoever loved the olden Church held Luther’s very name in execration.

One such tale early current at Halle was that, when the funeral procession arrived at Wittenberg, the coffin was found empty, Luther’s corpse having vanished on the road. A number of rooks having described circles in the air about the corpse at Halle, a later tale made them out to have been devils “streaming to the funeral of their prophet.”[1443] Proof of this general foregathering of the devils was even found in the comparative calmness of those possessed, who, it was argued, had evidently been forsaken for a while by their diabolical tenants, the latter’s presence at the burial explaining their temporary departure from their usual habitats.[1444] The corpse, it was also said, gave out so evil a smell that the bearers had to leave it on the road to Wittenberg.

Other versions of these tales deserve to be mentioned. According to Johann Oldecop, the Hildesheim Dominican (†1574), who, however, is not reliable in what he had at second hand, Luther was simply found dead in his bed. According to Simon Fontaine (1558), a French writer, who also speaks of his sudden death, he had “his nun” with him that night; this is also affirmed in the works of Jérôme Bolsec and James Laing, printed in Paris, as well as in a work published at Ingolstadt. According to William Reginald, Professor at the English College of Douay (1597), Luther had been strangled in the night by Catherine Bora. The same tale was afterwards told at Münster in Westphalia by Johann Münch (1617).

Even more common were the reports, quite in accordance with the manners which Luther had fostered, that the devil had murdered him. The Polish scholar, Stanislaus Hosius, asserted this in 1558, and, later, it is mentioned, though only tentatively, by the Dutch theologian, William Lindanus and the Paris theologian Prateolus. In 1615, Robert Bellarmine, speaking in general terms, says that Luther, after an illness lasting only a few hours, “yielded up his soul to the devil”;[1445] but the “Compendium fidei” 1607 of Franz Coster (already published in Dutch in 1595) had been beforehand in particulars of Luther’s death at the devil’s hands. He tells how, according to the statement of a noble lady of Eichsfeld, Luther’s body had been found with the “neck red and out of joint,” hence it was plain that “he had been strangled by the devil.” Peter Pázmány a Magyar writer (1613) had heard that the devil had appeared in the shape of a great sheep-dog to the guests at table on the evening previous to Luther’s death, and that Luther had exclaimed: “What, so soon?” Claude de Sainctes (1575) a French theologian, finds nothing extraordinary in Luther’s horrible death, since most of the Church’s foes had been brought to a violent end by the devil as the examples of Zwingli, Carlstadt, Œcolampadius and others showed!