Note 2 — Chapter XIII · THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT

Doubtless the spectacle of Protestant feuds and methods would go far to foster such unbelief; but though, as we have seen, there were aggressive Unitarians in Germany before 1530, who, being scholars, may or may not have drawn on Italian thought, thereafter there is reason to look to Italy as the source of the propaganda. Thence came the two Sozzini, the founders of Socinianism, of whom Lelio, the uncle of Fausto, travelled much in northern Europe (including England) between 1546 and 1552.2 As the earlier doctrine of Servetus shows clear affinities to that of the Sozzini, and his earlier books were much read in Italy between 1532 and 1540, he may well have given them their impulse.3 It is evidently to Servetus that Zanchi referred when he wrote to Bullinger in 1565 that “Spain bore the hens, Italy hatched the eggs, and we now hear the chickens piping.”4 Before Socinianism had taken form it was led up to, as we have seen, in the later writings of the ex-monk Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564), who, in the closing years of a much chequered career, combined mystical and Unitarian tendencies with a leaning to polygamy and freedom of divorce.5 His influence was considerable among the Swiss Protestants, though they finally expelled him for his heresies. From Geneva or from France, in turn, apparently came some of the English freethought of the middle period of the sixteenth century;6 for in 1562 Speaker Williams in the House of Commons, in a list of misbelievers, speaks of “Pelagians, Libertines, Papists, and such others, leaving God’s commandments to follow their own traditions, affections, and minds”7—using theologically the foreign term, which never became naturalized in English in its foreign sense. It was about the year 1563, again, that Roger Ascham wrote his Scholemaster, wherein are angrily described, as a species new in England, men who, “where they dare,” scorn both Protestant and Papist, “rejecting scripture, and counting the Christian mysteries as fables.”8 He describes them as “ἄθεοι in doctrine”; adding, “this last word is no more unknowne now to plane Englishe men than the Person was unknown somtyme in England, untill some Englishe man took peines to fetch that develish opinion out of Italie.”9 The whole tendency he connects in a general way with the issue of many new translations from the Italian, mentioning in particular Petrarch and Boccaccio. Among good Protestants his view was general; and so Lord Burghley in his Advice to his Son writes: “Suffer not thy sons to pass the Alps, for they shall learn nothing there but pride, blasphemy, and atheism.” As it happened, his grandson the second Earl of Exeter, and his great-grandson Lord Roos, went to Rome, and became not atheists but Roman Catholics.