44 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
Calvin in Geneva from 1537 onwards.^35 Indeed ‘Calvinist’ was initially
an epithet applied to them by their religious opponents, Catholic and
Lutheran alike. They usually referred to themselves as the ‘Reformed’
and to their faith as the ‘Reformed religion’, implying by that a sec-
ond reformation taking further the process initiated by Luther in 1517,
which in their view had not gone far enough. While Calvin was certainly
an influence, the German Reformed tended to look nearer to home
for their inspiration, which often stemmed from doctrines associated
with Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s closest collaborator and effective
successor.^36 Nevertheless the two had doctrinal differences, and some
of Melanchthon’s concepts tended in the same direction as Calvin’s.
Melanchthon’s text for the Augsburg Confession also differed in some
respects from Luther’s position, a feature which subsequently enabled
German Calvinists to claim adherence to it as a means of protecting
their position in the Empire.
The exact nature of the theological differences were endlessly and bit-
terly disputed between Lutheran and Reformed clerics and academics
throughout the remainder of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth
centuries, but they need not concern us here, any more than they con-
cerned ordinary people at the time. More significant for most were the
differences in external practice, in which the Reformed resembled the
English Puritans. The breaking of ordinary bread for the communion
rather than the use of specially prepared wafers was perhaps the most
obvious and symbolic, along with the use of wooden tables rather than
stone altars and plain rather than consecrated water.^37 Like the Puri-
tans too, the Reformed were inclined to iconoclasm, destroying pictures
and statues to ‘cleanse’ the churches, an approach which caused par-
ticular offence when the Calvinist Palatines reached Prague during the
Bohemian revolt.
The confessional division within the Protestant camp had impor-
tant political implications, the first of which concerned the position
of the Calvinists in respect of the benefits of the peace of Augsburg.
This became a significant issue once a number of princes of the Empire
adopted the Reformed religion, the first and most important of whom
was the elector of the Palatinate. Oddly enough, the Palatinate had
been one of the last major principalities to convert from Catholicism
to Lutheranism, which it did only in 1546. However Elector Friedrich
III was already well on the way towards a Reformed position by the time
of his accession in 1559, a process which was completed in the next few
years and consolidated by the adoption of the Heidelberg Catechism
as the basis of the electorate’s religion in 1563. The uncompromising