Hall, the typical Protestant chronicler, barely mentions religion.
Camden apologizes for touching lightly on church history and not
confining himself to politics and war, which he considers the proper
subject of the annalist. Buchanan ignores the Reformation; De Thou
passes over it with the fewest words, fearing to give offence to either
papists or Huguenots. Jovius has only a page or two on it in all his
works. In one place he finds the chief cause of the Reformation in a
malignant conjunction of the stars; in another he speaks of it as a
revival of one of the old heresies condemned at Constance. Polydore
Vergil pays small attention to a schism, the cause of which he found in
the weakness of men's minds and their propensity to novelty.

The one valuable explanation of the rise of Protestantism contributed
by the secular historians of this age was the theory that it was
largely a political phenomenon. That there was much truth in this is
evident; the danger of the theory was in its over-statement, and in its
too superficial application. How deeply the Reformation appealed to
the political needs {704} of that age has only been shown in the
nineteenth century; how subtly, how unconsciously the two revolutions
often worked together was beyond the comprehension of even the best
minds of that time. The political explanation that they offered was
simply that religion was a hypocritical pretext for the attainment of
the selfish ends of monarchs or of a faction. Even in this there was
some truth, but it was far from being the larger part.

[Sidenote: 1527]

Vettori in his _History of Italy_ mentions Luther merely to show how
the emperor used him as a lever against the pope. Guicciardini
[Sidenote: Guicciardini] accounts for the Reformation by the
indignation of the Germans at paying money for indulgences. From this
beginning, honest or at least excusable in itself, he says, Luther,
carried away with ambition and popular applause, nourished a party.
The pope might easily have allowed the revolt to die had he neglected
it, but he took the wrong course and blew the tiny spark into a great
flame by opposing it.

A number of French writers took up the parable. Brantome says that he
leaves the religious issue to those who know more than he does about
it, but he considers a change perilous, "for a new religion among a
people demands afterwards a change of government." He thought Luther
won over a good many of the cle