Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/261

 and Seeland submitted, and in August Copenhagen and Malmö alone held out.

These disasters were fatal to Wullenwever's power in Lübeck; during his absence in Mecklenburg the restoration of the conservatives was effected in August. Wullenwever eventually fell into the hands of the Archbishop of Bremen, was delivered to the Archbishop's brother, Duke Henry of Brunswick, and put to death in September, 1537. With the ruin of his party the prosecution of his war began to languish, and in 1536 Christian took possession of Copenhagen and made himself master of the two kingdoms of Denmark and Norway. He was crowned by the Lutheran apostle Bugenhagen, under whose auspices religion according to the straitest sect of Wittenberg was established in Denmark. Christian's triumph was no doubt largely due to national antipathy to the domineering interference of an alien State, but the national feeling was exploited by class prejudice, and the aristocracy in Denmark turned their victory to the same use as the German Princes did theirs in the Peasants' War. In both cases Lutheranism made common cause with the upper classes; the proclamation of the Gospel and the enforcement of serfdom went hand in hand, but the landlord was the predominant partner, and even the children of preachers remained in the status of serfs.

To Lübeck itself it is possible that the success of Wullenwever's grandiose ideas of mercantile empire might have been more fatal than their failure. According to Baltic nautical ballads Lübeck long regretted its turbulent Burgomaster, and his name is surrounded in popular legend with something of the halo of a van Artevelde, but his attempt to clothe the new democratic spirit in the worn-out garb of the city-empire was doomed from the first to end in disaster. He could not have permanently averted the decay of the Hanse towns or prevented the absorption of most of them in the growing territorial States; temporary success would only have prolonged the struggle without affecting the last result. Besides the local circumstances which would have rendered ineffectual the endeavour of Lübeck, under whatever form of municipal government it might have been made, to establish an imperial State, there was no element of stability in the revolutionary spirit of which that endeavour was the last manifestation. The future of Germany was bound up with the fortunes of the territorial principle, and it is impossible to determine exactly in what degree the Lutheran Reformation owed its salvation to its own inherent vitality, and in what to its alliance with the prevailing political organisation. Together Lutheranism and territorialism had crushed the revolutionary movement, whether it took the form of agrarian socialism, Münster Anabaptism, or urban democracy. From the conflict of creeds all but two had now been eliminated, Catholicism and Lutheranism; both were equally linked with the territorial principle, and, whichever prevailed, the political texture of Germany would still be the same. The subsidence