RELIGIOUS POLICY IN BRANDENBURG–PRUSSIA

Within the Protestant world and operating upon the common Protestant mind were particular driving centres, areas of special activity which, from the middle of the seventeenth century, moved ever further from the old Protestant heartlands in central Europe. Heidelberg and Hamburg kept some kind of contact with Germans overseas, Reformed and Lutheran; Sweden continued to supply pastoral assistance to the Swedes of the former New Sweden on the Delaware; the Pietist monarchy of Denmark gave its patronage to the celebrated Tranquebar mission: Amsterdam was more important than them all, but gradually yielded the palm to London. The Great Elector's dying words were ‘London and Amsterdam’, a prophecy as precisely fulfilled in the ecclesiastical as in the political sphere. In the non-hierarchical Protestant churches of the continent the link between church and state was normally formed by the court chaplain, and, from 1705 when Queen Anne's consort, Prince George of Denmark, appointed as his chaplain the Pietist Anton Wilhelm Bohme, the Great Elector's successors had a spokesman for their policies at the British court. Their Dutch connexions proved more problematic. In 1613 the Elector Johann Sigismund went over from the Lutheran to the Reformed confession, less, it seems, from the hope of furthering his claims to Reformed territories in the Rhineland, than from genuine admiration for what was then the most dynamic religious confession in Europe. This conversion had far-reaching implications.