The Tailor-King

by Anthony Arthur

—Friedrich Nietzsche

  HENRY GRAES RECOVERED quickly from his terrible ordeal and soon became revered in Münster as a living symbol of divine mercy and hope. As an apostle he now occupied a position of power equivalent to those of the two Bernards (Rothmann and Knipperdolling) and was thus a member of the king’s inner circle, privy to his plans and problems alike. Kerssenbrück tells us that not everyone believed his strange story. But those who doubted it could not do so on the ground that it was fantastic. The Bible offered many stories of similar rescues—of Daniel in the lions’ den, of Jonah from the whale, and particularly that of Peter, rescued from his chains in Herod’s dungeon by an angel who said, “Arise up quickly,” and led him from his cell. To deny Graes’s miraculous salvation out of hand would be to cast doubt on the literal truth of the Bible as the revealed Word of God. Moreover, Jan himself occupied his position as the result of his own visions from God and those of Johann Dusentschur. He could hardly have denied Henry Graes’s tale, then, on grounds of implausibility—though he might have thought it peculiar that Graes alone of the twenty-seven survived to tell it.

  The schoolmaster’s survival was in fact due not to angelic intervention but to his excellent education, his quick mind, and his suddenly flexible moral philosophy. The story he told Jan’s court was true up to the moment when he and his fellow apostles were taken to the prison in Iburg, the Bishop’s seat. When the prisoners were herded before the Bishop, von Waldeck heard one of them whisper to him, in Latin—a language that only the two of them would know—this plea: “Does the Bishop have no power to set a prisoner free?” The Bishop gave no sign that he had heard; but later Henry Graes was brought from his cell to be questioned further, not under torture but with wine and bread.

  He told the Bishop everything he knew about the beleaguered city, but that alone would not have saved his life—he would have revealed the same information under torture, and the Bishop had other spies to pass on such details. What kept Graes alive was his offer to return to the city as the Bishop’s man. He had been highly placed before; now he realized that he had been in the service of Satan, and he had no hesitation in seeing the devil defeated. He would become, if his plan worked, a privileged spy for the Bishop. He knew what he had to do to convince the fanatics there of his fidelity. He proposed to let himself be bound with chains and left before the city gate. When the guards discovered him, he would declare that an angel had miraculously delivered him from his imminent execution.

  It says much for Graes’s power of persuasion that he could convince a hardened cynic like Franz von Waldeck to agree to such a ludicrous plan. Then again, the Bishop must have regarded it as a risk-free proposition. If Graes failed in his masquerade, his friends would take care of him in ghoulish fashion. If he succeeded, he might well be useful. As for Graes, it could not have been a part of the plan that he should nearly freeze to death after being deposited before the city gate, but even that bad luck had worked to his advantage, providing proof of real danger.

  The Bishop’s frustrations with the Anabaptists in Münster, always intense, had peaked with the capture of the so-called apostles, bent on stirring up more trouble in his shaky realm; hence their extermination—excepting Henry Graes—virtually on the spot, without trial or hearing. He accepted Graes’s outlandish proposal because everything was working against him. He was anxious to avoid further military clashes, which seemed always to end badly for him, and to get out from under the expenses of the siege, which were mounting heavenward. Queen Marie of Burgundy had, it was true, recently offered the Bishop the loan of a few thousand guilders, as had the Bishop of Lüttich. But these sums were a pittance compared to the several hundred thousand guilders he had spent during the past eight months, and the patience and support of his fellow princes, never reassuring, now seemed to be tangibly lessening. The Roman Catholic Bishop turned in desperation for advice to the Lutheran Landgraf Philip of Hesse for help.

  Count Philip was no less eager than Bishop Franz to see the Münster fiasco come to a peaceful end; it was tarnishing the reputation of all Protestants and setting the stage for a counterreformation. He told the Bishop he would send his pastor, Dietrich Fabricius, to him for a last-ditch attempt to persuade the rebels to come to terms. A few days after the return of Henry Graes, on November 2, the Bishop sent a messenger under a flag of truce to Jan, asking for safe passage for Fabricius, which was granted.

  On his previous, similar mission, before the mass expulsion the previous February, Fabricius had been bullied and badly frightened by Rothmann’s followers, but he was nevertheless a good choice of ambassador. In earlier days he had been one of the more rebellious intellectual young advocates of the Reformation, and not hostile to some of the concepts of the Anabaptists. After study under Melanchthon, Luther’s disciple, Fabricius had been appointed to teach Hebrew in Cologne in 1526. His reputation as a radical almost lost him the post, and he grew more restive at the failures of the Reformation in the years that followed. He formed a close bond with a number of men who would become the most radical Anabaptists, including the doomed apostles sent out with Henry Graes, Dionysus Vinne, and Johann Klopriss. It was true that Fabricius had pulled back from the brink of religious radicalism, becoming instead the pastor of Philip of Hesse. But if anyone should be able to talk to Jan and his preachers, to persuade them to avoid further bloodshed and to “plant the seed of proper belief” among them, in Kerssenbrück’s phrase, it was Fabricius.

  Fabricius was met at the city gate by a delegation of twelve Anabaptists. Walking toward the City Hall with his armed hosts, he found the streets quiet—so little-used that grass was growing in the alleys—and the people subdued, apparently “pressed down and sad,” though he was not permitted to speak to any of them. After waiting for a few minutes in the City Hall, Fabricius heard a lively drum salute. Twenty young men dressed in satin and velvet marched through the wide doors; the king’s bodyguard, they took up positions around the long room and stood at attention. Two young pages followed, one bearing the king’s sword, the other the book in which his judgments and decrees were recorded. Finally the king himself entered, wearing a black velvet robe and a white silken cloak against which glittered a golden chain; at the end of the chain was the king’s coat of arms, through which a golden dagger was thrust. As the king was seated on his throne, Knipperdolling, Rothmann, and the Elders entered the room and took their seats. Rothmann then addressed the visitor. If he was a member of their brotherhood, he said, he could remain seated. Otherwise, he must stand. Fabricius rose and said that he came in peace and in the hope the Bishop’s just cause would be recognized. Several of the Elders rebuked him for his words, saying that the Bishop desired the king’s death.

  After a while Jan, bored with the scene, ended the royal audience and conducted Fabricius on a tour of the city’s defenses, obviously hoping to convey their solidity. Noting the many ruined churches, including the truncated Overwater Church, Fabricius asked Jan why their destruction had been necessary. “Sooner than let them be abused by the Papists,” Jan replied, he would pull them all down, just as he would “sooner eat the children in their mothers’ wombs than let them live to be unbelievers.”

  That night the shaken Lutheran slept uneasily at the King’s invitation in his palace, where he saw four of the sixteen wives but recorded no further conversations. The following morning he presented the Bishop’s case, in its strongest light, to Jan and the court in the City Hall. They should know, Fabricius said, that their war was no longer with Bishop Franz alone. Besides Marie of Burgundy, the Prince of Saxony had promised support. His own master, Landgraf Philip, had been disgusted by the Bishop’s murder of Dr. von Wyck but now was certain that the rebellion had to be crushed. Emperor Charles V had ordered the Spanish rulers in Holland to vigorously suppress any Anabaptist movements there, which meant that their long-anticipated salvation from Dutch supporters was doomed. Finally, Fabricius said, the Archbishop of Cologne had appealed on behalf of Bishop Franz to the Emperor for added
support. If Charles failed to help defeat Münster, the Archbishop had said, not only the neighboring cities in northern Germany would be threatened, but all of Germany; indeed, all of Christendom would be at risk.

  Surely Jan must see, Fabricius concluded, that the Bishop was not at liberty to do anything but crush the Anabaptist kingdom; his own survival depended on it. Even as they spoke, the guards at the city’s walls could watch the seven blockhouses under construction within arrow-shot of the city; if seven were insufficient, seventy would be built. Jan and his kingdom were doomed. They could surrender now and hope for mercy, or maintain their resistance and be sure of destruction.

  The twenty-five-year-old innkeeper and tailor’s apprentice was threatening not only the Empire but all of Christendom! Jan’s vanity must have been hugely gratified, but he did respond temperately at first, after his fashion: he would be willing to talk further to some of the princes who were not directly involved in helping the Bishop. But under no circumstances would they turn the city over to von Waldeck. They were all prepared to die first.

  Fabricius returned safely to the Bishop and gave him a written report of his discouraging findings. He recommended that the blockhouses be finished as soon as possible, and that the connecting walls between them, which the Bishop had been resisting because of their cost, also be completed. He had seen many signs of easy passage into and out of Münster, even two weeks after the unnoticed departure of the twenty-seven apostles and consequent attempts to tighten the cordon.

  It is no easy matter to seal off a city with a circumference of three miles, opening into vast fields threaded with drainage and irrigation ditches and hedgerows and trees. Nothing short of another virtual city of some three thousand soldiers nearly four miles long, completely enclosing it, could be expected to work, and the expense and labor of such a project were enormous. Seventy woodcutters were brought in, along with eighty-five carpenters, to finish building the blockhouses, and two thousand farmers for incidental labor. Several of the blockhouses were massive and all were formidable: one of the smallest was a square of which the sides measured 225 feet, about 60 feet per side. It was surrounded by its own moat, ten feet deep, and a rampart twenty-five feet thick and ten feet high; it rose ten feet above the rampart and had two cannons and six musket-slots. Several others were three times as large. By the end of December the blockhouses were complete; so too, finally, were the connecting ramparts, sturdy and broad and secure—so much so that a seven-horse wagon loaded with powder and ammunition could safely pass along it, in full view of the helpless rebels. By January the city was tightly sealed; a few men might sneak in or out, but the serious potential threat of a mass breakout was foreclosed.

  Autumn declined into winter, the cold, wet winter of northern Germany. Increasingly isolated behind their own walls and moats as well as by the Bishop’s surrounding wall, the Anabaptists could do little but reassure themselves of the righteousness of their cause and lay plans for securing relief from abroad. They turned again to the man who had provided the intellectual engine-power for their revolution, Pastor Bernard Rothmann, for inspiration and spiritual guidance.

  Jan’s contemporaries often derided his kingdom as a carnival of fools and Bernard Rothmann as a redheaded heretic and adulterer. But Rothmann was not a fool. He wrote serious arguments that are discussed with respect today by religious historians and that forced responses from the greatest minds of his time, including Melanchthon, Luther, and Zwingli. One of those works, “Restitution,” was published in October, before the departure of the twenty-seven apostles, and doubtless reinforced their sense of divine mission.

  The title “Restitution” refers to the restoration of the original or primitive Church, a goal that the Anabaptists shared with Luther and Zwingli. Rothmann did not disparage the accomplishments of these men but put them into a broader context. There had not been, as George H. Williams explains Rothmann’s argument, just one Fall from Paradise, that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or one restoration of God’s grace in the birth and life of Jesus. Rather, there had been a series of falls and restorations: first, “the fall into bondage in Egypt and the return to Canaan, [followed by] the exile into Babylon and the restoration”; then another in the second century; and more recently “a final restoration, begun by Erasmus and Luther and climaxing” in Jan van Leyden.

  The Anabaptists parted from Luther and the other Protestants in their refusal to limit or divide their vision of the truth of God, either by turning the biblical accounts into allegorical “stories” or by constructing new bastions of churchly authority. Their slogan, stamped on their medals and on the coins that the apostles threw at the feet of their antagonists, was “The Word Has Become Flesh and Dwells in Us: One God, One Faith, One Baptism.” Church and state were the same; an absolute theocracy was the only structure of government possible.

  In early January 1535, Jan sent copies of “Restitution” and of another work, “On the Secret Significance of Scripture,” to Philip of Hesse, to Luther, and to Melanchthon, among others, in an obvious effort to lessen their opposition. Philip responded with some temperance that “if the thing depended only on me,” he could help them plead their cause where it was just. But the rebels should have “addressed the princes of the empire” before, not after, they took the law into their own hands, “flying to arms, erecting a kingdom, electing a king, and sending prophets and apostles abroad to stir up the towns and the people. Nevertheless, it is possible that even now [the Anabaptists’] demands may be favorably listened to,” if they called back those they had expelled and returned their property and restored the city’s proper government; for all government was derived from God, and the rebels had acted against this basic truth from the beginning.

  The response from Luther, either written or approved by him, was addressed to the Anabaptists in Münster as a group. Notoriously hot-tempered and prone to hyperbole, Luther nevertheless provides a sense of the passions stirred by Rothmann and Jan among those who might be presumed at least marginally sympathetic to their position. “Since you are led astray by the devil into such blasphemous error, and are drunk and utterly captive to your delusions, you wish, as is Satan’s way, to make yourselves into angels of light and to paint in brightness and color your devilish doings.” Earlier Luther had joked that if the devil was involved in the carryings-on in Münster it must be through the efforts of an incompetent “schoolgirl apprentice,” inasmuch as what the Anabaptists were proposing was so shockingly revolting that they could never hope to find support among the people. Now Luther was forced to take the rebels more seriously, for they were using “Holy Scripture as all heretics have always done.” Almost plaintively, Luther continues, “What shall I say? You let all the world see that you understand far less about the kingdom of Christ and than did the Jews … for the Scripture and the prophets point to Messiah, through whom all was to be fulfilled, and this the Jews also believed. But you want to make it point to your Tailor-King, to the great disgrace and mockery of Christ … .” Even worse than denying and supplanting Christ, Luther continued, speaking now of himself in the third person, “you have cast away all that Dr. Martin Luther taught you, and yet it is from him that you have received, next to God, whatever sound learning of the Scripture you have. You have given a new definition of faith, after your own fashion,” which has not only “darkened” but “utterly annihilated” its true meaning.

  The modern reader is struck by the extraordinary heat and violence of the responses from recognized Protestant leaders who might be expected to have some sympathy for protesters. It is the Anabaptists advocating “Restitution” who by contrast look almost measured and thoughtful; from their perspective they were engaged in a brave and principled attempt to recapture the purity of the Christian faith that had been lost, in the face of determined opposition by a corrupt and powerful religious and political establishment. It was this kind of appeal that must have originally attracted such men as Henry Graes—and, for that matter, Bernard Rothmann�
��to the Anabaptist cause: not fools or villains, but seekers after truth in a corrupt world.

  But the darker side of the story fatally undermines any pretensions to idealism—the story that, among many others, Herbert Rusher, Henry Mollenheck, Gert the Smoker, Katherine Holscher and Barbara Butendinck, and the headless banquet guest could have told, if they had been allowed to live. It was the story told in the second pamphlet Rothmann was writing at this time, entitled “Revenge.”

  If “Restitution” showed the Company of Christ in its better aspects, “Revenge” explained why they were feared. Rothmann begins softly, with the beautiful words from Ecclesiastes 3:1, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” But this does not mean passively waiting for God to “come with his angels from heaven to wreak revenge on the godless. No, dear brother, this is not so. He will come, that is true, but the revenge must be executed first by the servants of God.” He recalls in order to deny them the words of Isaiah, 2:4: “ … they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” On the contrary, Rothmann now says—it is time for them to turn their plowshares into swords so that they and their leader, King Jan, wearing “the armor of David,” might seek “revenge with the help of God [against] all Babylonian power and extinguish all godlessness … .”

  Like “Restitution,” “Revenge” was a powerfully persuasive piece of writing to those who were sympathetic to its arguments and its rhetoric. It was intended to rouse its readers not to meditative speculation but to action. On Christmas Eve, 1534, a thousand copies of “Revenge” were handed to one of Jan’s most militant Dutch supporters, Jan van Geelen, along with a large amount of gold. There were Anabaptist supporters in Deventer, Groningen, Amsterdam, Delft, and in King Jan’s home city, Leyden. With three companions, van Geelen was ordered to use “Revenge” to rouse the faithful and to use the gold to buy weapons for them. Sometime before Easter, they were then to gather for a march on Münster, where they would attack the Bishop from the rear while Jan and his men broke through his lines to freedom.