The Tailor-King

by Anthony Arthur

  Henry Graes, who had been given a special robe, colored green for persistence and gray for gratitude to God, was by now a privileged member of King Jan’s inner circle. However, the life of a secret agent is never a comfortable one—he was only on parole by the Bishop in return for useful services, and he must have wondered constantly when he would somehow be exposed to Jan as a traitor, with consequences that did not bear thinking about. He knew that Jan van Geelen’s mission was no trivial threat, and that the Bishop would reward Graes with his life if he could get the information to him. It was time to separate himself for good from the Company of Christ.

  On New Year’s Day, 1535, Graes revealed to his brothers and sisters in Christ that he had been visited yet again by a commanding vision: he was to leave Münster immediately and to raise support throughout southern Germany. With this aid, in addition to that brought by van Geelen, the City of God would be delivered from the oppressors. Jan obligingly gave Graes a letter that began, in grandly regal fashion, “We, Johann, the just king of the new temple and servant of almighty God, do hereby advise all who are bound up with us that the bearer of this letter, Henry Graes, is a prophet blessed by God,” and ended with the injunction that all who can do so must help him in whatever way possible. It was signed “Pronounced in Münster, the city of God, and under our seal in the 26th year of our life, the first year of our reign, and on the second day of the first month after the birth of Jesus Christ, the son of God, in the year 1535.” Jan also provided a diversionary attack on the night of January 2, enabling Graes to make his way easily through the enemy lines.

  Once out of the city, Graes immediately rode to the Bishop’s palace in Iburg, where he made a full report of everything he had seen, as of the first of January. In addition to his news about the van Geelen mission, Graes revealed that the Bishop’s blockade was having an effect. Münster’s prosperity had been based on trade, farming, and the Church, all now canceled, and for the past ten months it had been consuming its dwindling resources. As winter settled in, there was not enough fuel for heating, as most of the wood set aside for fires had been used to shore up the city walls after the August attack. There was little meat to eat—they had only three hundred head of cattle left, which they were trying to save for later—and only enough rye and wheat for another month.

  The mood of the people was mixed, Graes said. The fifteen hundred armed men who controlled the city were well fed from provisions set aside for them; they had in many cases several wives to tend to their every need; and they remained certain that God was on their side. The people, however, were beginning to fall into a deep melancholy. Trapped between the Bishop who called them heretics and their king who alternately inspired and terrified them, they were too frightened to do more than struggle from one day to the next. The women and children were suffering the most and had the least power to change their situation. In sum, Graes said, privation and hunger would render the city helpless in another two or three months, and it would fall like a rotten apple into the outstretched hand of Bishop Franz.

  The Bishop, having no great incentive to move against an enemy that would inevitably succumb, relaxed in his comfortable castle in Iburg and left the Anabaptists to freeze and starve behind their walls for the rest of the winter. Henry Graes, who presumably had expected to be allowed to return to his home in Borkum, remained as an uncomfortable guest, in complete seclusion: he had, it would turn out, two more services to perform.

  The first of these would occur in March, when the Bishop grew impatient with growing unrest in the small city of Wesel. Like Warendorf, Wesel had been outspoken in its support of King Jan, and reports had reached von Waldeck that hundreds of armed Anabaptists were gathering there to march on Münster. Late one afternoon near the end of March, the faithful in Wesel were overjoyed to find in their midst none other than Brother Henry himself, King Jan’s most famous apostle, the only one of the twenty-seven to survive, the man the angel had plucked from the scaffold before the very eyes of the Bishop himself (the legend had acquired a few embellishments). Nothing had been heard of Graes since his departure from Münster in January, supposedly for southern Germany, but now he was among them, with two tough-looking assistants, to provide them with inspired leadership.

  Graes demanded to know what the people of Wesel planned to do to help King Jan in his hour of need. They would do whatever he asked, the people said. Graes suggested that they march on Münster the next week, but that first they gather their weapons together for safekeeping in the city arsenal. This was done according to his instructions. On April 5, Graes sent one of his two “assistants”—both of them the Bishop’s men assigned to watch Graes as well as to protect him—with a message to Count von Jülich, the knight in whose domain the city lay. The count’s men, several hundred in number, stormed into town and secured the armory. Without weapons the rebels had to surrender immediately. Six of the ringleaders were beheaded. The rest were allowed to live, but had to appear in church to beg for mercy, wearing white gowns of repentance.

  The schoolmaster’s final contribution would be revealed at a particularly difficult time for King Jan. At the conclusion of the murderous banquet the previous October, Jan had vowed, on the head of the profane soldier he had killed, to see the city free by Easter Sunday 1535. Otherwise, his own life was forfeit. That day, March 28, was now imminent and the city was still under siege. Although we can be certain that no one was brave or stupid enough to remind him of his promise, Jan knew he had to account for it. He went into a long seclusion, while the city waited anxiously for him to announce his decision. He was haggard and humble when he finally appeared in the Market Square on Good Friday, March 26. For the past three days, he revealed to the assembled crowd, he had wrestled with the problem not only of his fate as their king but of his subjects’ fates as well. Finally, God had told him that he, King Jan, had erred in his great compassion. He had taken the sins of his people unto himself, and thus he had accordingly been confused and misled. God now told Jan that when he had promised their deliverance by Easter; he had meant their souls would be delivered into true righteousness by that time. Because of Jan’s efforts, God had told him, they had achieved this happy condition: the souls of all who listened to Jan this day had been freed into righteousness. Therefore it was not necessary for their king to sacrifice himself; indeed, it was positively forbidden.

  Jan’s ingenuity and stagecraft had saved him for the moment from his own folly. But almost immediately he had to deal with an almost equally mortal threat—a letter from Henry Graes, found nailed to the city gate. How it came there, under the eyes of the guards, is a mystery. Even stranger is Jan’s decision to make it known to all his people; he had executed several of them who had been found carrying leaflets from the Bishop offering rewards for leaving the city. The common supposition was that the first guard to see it had read it and was so thunderstruck by its revelation that he had given it to another; each man who read it passed it along like a hot potato to the next, fearing for his life if he had to be the bearer of such terrible news to King Jan. By the time it reached Bernard Knipperdolling, the only man who had the courage to hand it to the king, too many people had seen Graes’s letter for it to be kept secret, or for those who knew the secret to be killed.

  There was never any question that the letter was genuine, for it bore the apostle’s own seal. Graes had written it earlier, in January, before his mission to Wesel. Now the Bishop saw no reason for holding it back, knowing what a potent assault it would be. The letter begins with a prayer for God to “protect us all in His loving mercy.” It continues:

  Dear fellow-citizens. God has opened my eyes so that I now see how what we have wrought in Münster is false and poisonous; He has commanded me to hold up for you the mirror of your wickedness, as He has held it up for me. I beg you to open your eyes—it is high time!—and to see that what you have done is against God and His divine command. All the prophets are only men like me. You poor, stupid fools have been deceived, betr
ayed, and misled. I know everything. You may still save your lives if you will turn from your path and leave this godless business behind. This is God’s command. So that you will be sure to believe that this letter comes from me, Henry Graes, I have sealed it with my signet ring, which you all know.

  The schoolmaster’s parting admonition was written in what Friedrich Reck termed “honest medieval Westphalian dialect” and had the ring of truth. Coupled with the proof of the seal, it could not be denied. King Jan could only rage and bitterly remind his followers that false prophets abounded in times of trial: they would have to redouble their efforts to guard against further treachery.

  10

  FLIGHT

  For want and famine they were solitary, fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste.

  —Job 30:3

  JAN WAS WISER than he knew—traitors were indeed all around him, including the carpenter Henry Gresbeck, who had been an apparently loyal Anabaptist since his arrival in Münster more than a year earlier. Now Gresbeck had written a letter, smuggled out of the city by yet another traitor, to his former master Count Robert Manderscheid. Written in mid-April, shortly after the turncoat apostle Henry Graes’s more public letter had appeared, it begins directly with an admission of error:

  “Honored and noble sir: When I departed from you last year with your permission for leave for fourteen days to visit my poor mother in Münster, I had not intended to stay here, but it proved impossible to leave, especially in that I have taken a wife and she and I and my mother are now living with her mother and father and her brothers.” He has married to protect the young woman, Gresbeck implies; “had I not done so, strangers would have moved in with them, or the house would have been burned.” He has had to stay in Münster to protect his new family and his mother, though the warning words of his master’s mother still ring in his ears: “She spoke truly when she said, ‘Master Henry, if you return to Münster, you will have to let yourself be baptized,’” which would put him beyond the possible forgiveness of the Bishop, as Henry was still a devout Catholic.

  “I did not want to believe it,” Gresbeck now admits, but his mistress had been right; it had happened as she said, and he now has to beg his master’s forgiveness: “I have always been your loyal servant and will be again for the rest of my life.” But his life will be a short one unless he can escape and help to bring an end to the terrible siege, for his mother and his wife and her family, like almost everyone else, are dying from hunger. He has only two choices: “I must either stay here and starve or escape and risk death from the Bishop’s soldiers.”

  Gresbeck asks Manderscheid to see that mercy is granted to his mother and to Clara Clevorn, his wife, and to her parents and her two brothers, Albert and Wilhelm, whatever happens to him. He pleads for patience: “My dear master, my heart is too sore to tell you now of all that I have seen, but I hope the day will come when I can explain it to you.” In the meantime, whether he lives or dies is up to God, but Gresbeck hopes his master will assure the Bishop that he is a good and true man. “I am ready to leave the city to cross over,” Gresbeck concludes. “I am assigned to the watchtower opposite the Cleves Blockhouse, by the Holy Cross Gate. If someone will call out this name, Hans von Brielen, from the blockhouse, I will know that this message has been received and will cross over at the nearest opportunity. In heaven’s name, though, do not let me be called by my own name, or my head will leave my neck. Please, my dear master, do your best for me. I will be your true servant for as long as I live. Master Henry, Carpenter of Münster.”

  It is hardly fair to stigmatize as “traitors” those who tried to flee or to undermine Jan’s kingdom of terror and privation. Some, like Gresbeck, had entertained doubts about Anabaptism from the beginning. Others, like the oddly named young Danish nobleman Turban Bill, were spies for the Bishop. And still others were hapless former believers who made fatal errors.

  Turban Bill had allowed himself to be captured during the attack of the previous August. After “converting” to Anabaptism, he had worked his way into the confidence of the young king, who, born a bastard to a peasant woman, must have retained a primitive awe of inherited as opposed to self-administered nobility. In April Bill disappeared without warning, arousing Jan’s suspicions; these were confirmed when a young woman who had been a prostitute, Margaret Tunneken, admitted under torture that she had stolen money from the city chancellery for Bill and had given him a letter to the Bishop begging for mercy for herself. Another young woman, Anna Hoenes, said she had given Bill eight guilders for assistance. And a third, Else Drier, admitted that she had known of Bill’s activities.

  The three women were taken to the Cathedral Square. The first two were beheaded by Master Niland, who declared with satisfaction that God had chosen the right kind of work for him. The third woman, however, was a special case. Else Drier was the mistress of Bernard Knipperdolling—not one of his five wives, as she would have been if she had not been a prostitute before her conversion, but the woman to whom he turned for comfort and support as well as for sexual favors. Accused now and condemned to die for treason, she turned on Knipperdolling, who stood beside the executioner. It was he, she shouted, he, the great Knipperdolling, who was the traitor, since he had been her lover and was now prepared to watch her die. Knipperdolling had earlier ordered his first—that is, his original—wife, Martha, to stand in the Cathedral Square for two hours holding a sword above her own neck for displeasing him. Now, hearing himself publicly exposed and reviled by a whore, the enraged merchant tore the sword from the hand of Master Niland and cut off the head of his mistress himself.

  The carnage continued as treachery, real or perceived, was punished. Jan’s queen, Divara, inadvertently caused the death of a young man in her retinue, Sander Busch, by giving him a ring which, when the king saw it and learned its source, cost the boy his head. Another of her servants, called Tall Albert, was responsible for tending the few remaining cows in the city herd. The herd was pastured in a meadow beyond the outer moat, safely under the guns of the roundel during the day and brought each evening back into the city. Albert tried to purchase his freedom and forgiveness from the Bishop by driving the cows toward the nearest blockhouse. Jan personally executed him. Henry Graes’s wife, who had, surprisingly, not suffered after his treason was revealed, was now put to death, with another woman, on charges of stealing bread.

  A tailor, Claes Northorn, was executed because a letter he wrote to the Bishop offering to reveal a secret entrance to the city was intercepted. Northorn was tortured until he revealed the extent of his plans, then condemned to die. He had sufficient courage, according to Gresbeck’s account, to taunt Jan, saying, “Who selected you as king? What about your promise to die if we were still under siege by Easter? You’ll soon sit yourself for God’s judgment, you damned bloodhound!” “Do you think you will be there to see that happen?” Jan scoffed, and struck off his head. The rest of Jan’s followers then leaped upon the body and cut it into twelve pieces, which were nailed on the city gates. The head was placed on a long stake on top of the Cathedral. “The heart and liver,” as might be expected, Gresbeck scornfully says, “were eaten by a Hollander.”

  Jan’s terror tactics were relatively selective, directed mostly against the few who had the courage or the folly to resist him openly. The hunger that could drive people to cannibalism was far more widespread and even more difficult for Jan to deal with than treason. Already, in addition to Henry Graes’s wife and her friend, a woman had been executed for taking more than her allotted portion of horseflesh from the public butcher shop, and a ten-year-old boy had been hanged—twice, because the rope broke the first time—for stealing apples from a fruit stall in the market.

  By mid-May, thousands of people were facing starvation. The king and his court continued to dine well, however, because all the produce from the private plots had been appropriated for the palace and for the approximately eight hundred armed men assigned to the city’s defense (all that
were left after deaths, illness, and, in particular, desertion). For everyone else, even the coarse barley used for making bread was now almost gone. The cattle that had cost Claes Northorn his life had been eaten. The remaining horses had been killed and butchered, a sure sign that the promised escape through the enemy lines was no longer even conceivable. During the preceding summer, when one hundred and twenty horses had been slaughtered, their heads and tails and innards had been buried. Now everything was eaten, including hooves and intestines. Every cat and dog had long since vanished into the cooking pots, and the mice and rats that would have gone to the cats were caught and fried in the tallow from candles. River snakes, hedgehogs, sparrows, anything that moved was devoured. People ate the green bark and tender shoots of the willows that grew by the river Aa, and they ate grass. They ate chalk. They ate dried cow dung. One woman ate her still-born baby.

  “Terrible maladies” resulting from famine, according to Kerssenbrück, afflicted the starving people; “their flesh decomposed and rotted” on their bones; “their skin become livid, their lips withdrawn; their eyes, fixed and round, stared from their sockets; they wandered around town, haggard and hideous, like mummies, and died by the hundred in the streets. The king had the bodies cast into large common graves, where they were dug up at night and devoured by the starving. Night and day the houses and streets resounded with moans and sobbing cries. Young men and old, women and children sank into the darkest despair.”