Note 96 — Chapter XI · THE REFORMATION, POLITICALLY CONSIDERED

On lines of simple Protestantism the movement was rapid, many aristocrats and clergy declaring for it;96 and in the Diets of 1550 and 1552 was shown an increasingly strong anti-Catholic feeling, which the Church was virtually powerless to punish. In 1549 a parish priest publicly married a wife, and the bishop of Cracow abandoned the attempt to displace him. The next bishop, Zebrzydowski, a favourite pupil of Erasmus, was said by a Socinian writer of the period to have openly expressed disbelief in immortality and other dogmas;97 but when in 1552 a noble refused to pay tithes, he ecclesiastically condemned him to death, and declared his property confiscated. The sentence, however, could not be put in force; and when the other heads of the Church, seeing their revenues menaced and their clergy in large part tending to heresy,98 attempted a general and severe prosecution of backsliding priests, the resistance of the magistracy brought the effort to nothing.99 The Diet of 1552 practically abrogated the ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and despite much intrigue the economic interest of the landowners continued to maintain the Protestant movement, which was rapidly organized on German and Swiss models. It was by the play of its own elements of strife that its ascendancy was undermined.