The Tailor-King

by Anthony Arthur

  In this dreadful emergency, King Jan tightened his hold on the allegiance of his true supporters and found ways to rid himself of the rest. He accomplished the first goal by announcing a reward for his most faithful followers: he divided up the whole of Germany and gave it to a dozen men who until a year before had been simple folk. The shopkeeper Johann Denker became the Prince of Saxony; the tailor Bernard Moer now owned Braunschweig; Herman Redeker, the shoemaker who had been one of the first citizens of Münster to support Jan, would replace Count von Juelich as the ruler of Cleves; a coppersmith named Leddanus would become the new Archbishop of Cologne; and so on. Each of the dozen new princes and archbishops and counts was given command of twenty-four men for the final defense and ultimate battle with the Bishop and the current holders of those positions, after which they would be free to claim their rewards.

  There is an almost whimsical quality of make-believe to Jan’s behavior at this point that some later apologists, especially the Communists in the nineteenth century, would find perversely appealing. What a clever parody of the very system that he was attacking! And quelle justesse! How different, after all, were King Jan and Emperor Charles V in their talents, their principles, their behavior? What did Jan van Leyden do that was worse than the deeds of the Prince-Bishop? Give the devil his due, they say; he did not lack for inventiveness or courage.

  The most vivid illustration of the antagonists’ essential sameness in one critical respect is provided by their approaches to the problem of dealing with starving people. Jan’s solution was to tell those who wanted to leave that they were free to go. But they had to understand that he could not forgive them for deserting his holy cause; under no circumstances would they be permitted to return to Münster, no matter what the Bishop did to them. Despite his warning, hundreds of people, beginning in mid-April, passed through the city gates toward the Bishop’s army.

  But the Bishop was not eager to receive the refugees. He had ordered the entire city to surrender, not just a part of it. Besides, he knew that these hungry mouths would deplete Jan’s supplies and shorten his resistance if he could not get rid of them. The Bishop ordered his soldiers to shoot the men and turn the women and children back into the strip between the city’s outer wall and his own cordon. Four miles in circumference and a few hundred yards wide, what a few months before had been a pleasant medieval tapestry of farms, woods, and tiny villages was now a stripped and ruined wasteland of shattered trees, rain-filled wagon ruts, and debris from months of shelling.

  The Bishop’s chief commander, Count Ulrich von Dhaun, protested. It was against all conscience to kill these unarmed men, and pitiful and terrible beyond words to let women and children die of hunger before their very eyes. He wanted to send Jan a message that he would be permitted to take the refugees back within the comparative safety of the walls, even though Jan’s men had already barred the doors to the refugees and fired on them when they pleaded to be allowed to return. The Bishop ignored von Dhaun, instead executing several prisoners and tying them to posts and wagon wheels that were placed in front of the city gates as a message and a warning: if the rebels surrendered immediately, the innocent would be spared. Otherwise, they would all end up as these had. On April 26, four more refugees were beheaded and their bodies displayed in a similar manner.

  By early May, up to three hundred people had left the city; by June 3, the totals were an estimated four hundred men, four hundred women, and a great many children. The Bishop’s soldiers were killing between twenty to fifty men per day, as well as a total of fifty renegades from their own side who had deserted to the Anabaptists, only to find conditions there intolerable. The women and children huddled against the barricades, where some of the soldiers’ wives and mistresses took pity on them, throwing them bread, and bringing a number of the children into the blockhouse. The soldiers themselves, full of bitter memories of earlier humiliations at the hands of these same people, were less inclined to show mercy.

  Von Dhaun begged Philip of Hesse for advice. Act according to your conscience and your reason, Philip advised the general; perhaps the Bishop could be persuaded that refugees could be held safely in small groups, and some of them might be able to impart valuable information if they were allowed to live. But the Bishop was now absent from the scene, having taken to his bed with a fever. Von Dhaun asked the Bishop’s council for advice; like Philip, the council left it to the general, as a man of honor, to make the right choice.

  Finally, in early June, the refugees were released from their purgatory between the antagonists’ walls. All of the women were brought to the Wolbeck house of the Bishop’s most reliable man, Eberhard von Morrien, to be held until a decision could be reached concerning their fate. The foreign women would be sent home after the local authorities had been alerted, to keep them from making trouble, while the rest—local women and those from other German cities and states—would be held under guard until the city fell. Philip declined to offer advice, other than to suggest that von Dhaun accept the word of the women that they would cause no more trouble and let them go free. The council insisted on giving the responsibility for the refugees, including the possibility that some would be condemned to death, to the Bishop. As for the men, it had to be determined if they had been forced to join the Anabaptists or had been willing volunteers, but this process would have to wait until after the conquest.

  In all this time there had been no response to Gresbeck’s letter to Count Manderscheid, and by late May the young carpenter was desperate. He had been able to keep his mother and his wife and her family alive by pilfering extra rations from the guards’ allotment. Although the captain of the guard, formerly one of the Bishop’s men, was friendly and seemed sympathetic to his plight, Gresbeck was afraid that if he was found stealing soldiers’ rations he would be executed. Already the terror had reached into the lives of all, even as the once meticulous discipline on the watches began to disintegrate.

  The erratic nature of the terror, mixed as it was with odd moments of lenience, was especially frightening. One of the soldiers had approached Jan as the king sat on his throne in the Cathedral Square, his head in his hands in obvious though uncharacteristic melancholy. “I must have food!” the soldier cried, clutching at Jan’s arm, and those watching were sure the man would die on the spot. But Jan only smiled wanly and walked slowly into his palace. To Gresbeck this sudden change of character was more alarming than the king’s previously predictable fury. He determined to leave the city with or without a sign from the Cleves Blockhouse.

  He must have somehow signaled his intent to the captain of the guard—who himself, as he then confided to Gresbeck, was planning to go back to the Bishop he had deserted the previous autumn. They would go together; half of the twelve men on his watch, a total of six, including themselves, were ready to take their chances with the Bishop rather than stay with the blood-drenched king and his zealous apostles. Gresbeck must have felt reassured, for this young professional soldier from Frankfurt was clearly a man who knew how to stay alive. His given name was Johann Nagel. Though small, less than five feet in height, he was aggressive and hot-tempered, and his behavior belied his childish nickname of Hansel Eck, “little Hans in the corner.” Little Hans was constantly in trouble for gambling, drinking, and brawling. Fortunately, he was also very good at his job, constructing von Dhaun’s siege ramparts; and, though not formally a cavalryman, a Reiter, he sat a horse like a dwarfish centaur and could lance a coinsized ring on the first pass.

  The previous October Hansel had started a brawl while playing dice in a tavern and “knocked a comrade bloody.” Thrown into the stockade, he escaped the same night and fled toward the city gate, pursued by shouting soldiers. The guards fired on the pursuers and allowed Hansel to enter. He told King Jan that he would rather live with the wildest beasts in the forest than return to the Bishop’s army. He had valuable information for the king about the Bishop’s plans for the blockhouses and their linking cordon, and he could help the king improve
his own defenses. Jan approved of the little man’s spirit and was heartened by his desertion of the clearly weakened Bishop. His great skill in the medieval jousts in which the tailor-king was prone to indulge that autumn and his cocky charm led the king to make Hansel Eck a member of his inner circle, and until recently the young turncoat had lived very comfortably as a part of the king’s palace entourage. Now, though, he had been reassigned to guard duty, which was boring and dangerous at the same time, and he had had enough.

  Shortly before midnight on Sunday, May 23, Henry Gresbeck, Hansel Eck, and four other renegade watchmen quietly left their posts on the outer wall at the Holy Cross Gate and slipped into the moat. The other six men on watch were dozing in the earthen bunker that they had fashioned near the base of the outer gate. Though this was forbidden on pain of death, the long period of somnolence on the Bishop’s side of the wall and a feeling of lassitude and indifference had undermined the once formidable discipline of the guards. Especially in bad weather they burrowed into their bunkers and left it to the next guard post to sound the alarm, if one was needed. Spring thunderstorms had swirled around the region for days, and clouds now obscured the moon. As the men paddled across the moat, the wind came up and shredded the clouds; shouts from the city walls revealed that they had been seen: “Come back, brothers, come back!” “They’ve discovered us!” Hansel said to Gresbeck as the other four soldiers began scrambling through the grass toward the nearest part of the Bishop’s ramparts. “In that case,” Gresbeck replied, watching them go, “I’m not going that way. I will make for the Cleves Blockhouse. Come with me if you like.” They heard the trumpets announcing the changing of the Bishop’s guard, a time when the watchmen were always distracted and movement was easier. Hans disappeared with the other soldiers, leaving Gresbeck alone.

  The wind died, and the night grew so dark that he became lost; cold and frightened, he groped his way toward the Cleves Blockhouse. An hour before dawn he thought he had found it, a dark bulk dimly outlined against the black sky. He waited next to the deep ditch that surrounded the blockhouse for the sun to come up. Behind him lay the kingdom of Jan van Leyden, and certain death if he now tried to return. Before him lay the soldiers of the Bishop, who had already killed hundreds of men who, like himself, had tried to surrender. In a masterpiece of understatement, Gresbeck says he was “lonely and afraid.”

  At first light he stood upright to reveal himself to the unseen guards he knew were watching. “Come forward!” ordered the guards. “Come back!” shouted the Anabaptist guards from across the moat. Gresbeck descended into the ditch that surrounded the blockhouse and climbed painfully through thornbushes toward the soldiers, whose weapons remained fixed on him. When he reached the top, he could see two soldiers waiting outside the blockhouse by a barricade at the top of the ditch. Crouching before them in a thicket of thorns, half-dead from hunger, cold, and fear, he could see the guards looking curiously down at him and hear them talking. They were discussing his future. “Let’s shoot him,” one said. No, the other replied, they would “take him prisoner to see what he had to say. He’s just a youngster; we’ll let him live.”

  “Dear comrades,” Gresbeck pleaded, “I was a soldier once too, like you. I beg you to take me to your captain.” First tell us, they said, how things were in the city. Very bad, Gresbeck replied; everyone was starving and the Anabaptists were going crazy, killing people right and left. That was why he had escaped. “Please,” he begged the soldiers again, “please take me prisoner.” The guards thrust their long spears downward. “Take hold,” they commanded. He did so, each hand grasping a spear just above the sharp pointed blade. The soldiers yanked him up through his thornbush cover to where they could grasp him by both his hands and by one leg and heaved him over the barrier.

  Now they will surely kill me, Gresbeck thought, and he waited on his hands and knees for the fatal blow. “Get up,” the older guard said, “we’re not going to kill you.” But they made him strip, to be sure he carried no hidden knives, before they led him inside the blockhouse. They summoned the captain of the guard and said they had captured this fellow and chosen not to kill him because of his youth. “Let him enter,” the captain said, looking at Gresbeck. “You can thank God that you are here and that you are still alive. All the others who have tried to surrender have been killed.” He ordered food and beer to be brought for Gresbeck. After he had had his fill, Gresbeck begged permission to speak to the captain. Another man had escaped with him, he said, a former soldier who had been captured. He was called Hans Nagel and Gresbeck hoped they would take him prisoner and not kill him. The captain sent some men out to search; one of them came back shortly to report that he had asked around about Hans Nagel and the word was out that he was a traitor. If he was caught, he would be sliced into a hundred pieces.

  Before noon two senior officers appeared and conducted Gresbeck to the command headquarters at Wolbeck, where he was taken to see Count Ulrich von Dhaun and Count Oberstein. It was a cold reception; since Hille Feyken’s attempt to kill the Bishop, all purported turncoats from the City of Zion were regarded as potential murderers. These two august commanders loathed the sight of the Anabaptists who had so long resisted them. Young Henry Gresbeck, we can be sure, was shaking with fright as he tried to persuade them that what he said was the truth. Indeed, he said, he knew a way through the city wall through which the soldiers might enter. The disciplined watches that had kept the city safe had broken down under the press of hunger and terror. It would take no more than a few men to overpower the guards and open the gate to the entire attacking army.

  Gresbeck never learned, or at any rate does not tell us, exactly what had happened to his letter to Count Manderscheid, but then everything happening was confusing, including his own situation. The narrative that describes his actions is written in the third person about an unnamed “citizen” who escapes with Hansel Eck. Written several years after the events in Münster, it remained anonymous for centuries, until a nineteenth-century scholar put all the pieces together and confirmed Gresbeck as the author. Count Manderscheid, who saves the “citizen,” is presumed to have been the former master addressed in Gresbeck’s signed letter, but he is not named in it and he never saw it—or, at least, he was not the first to see it, the Bishop was. These are not the inevitable confusions that arise from the passage of time but deliberate obfuscations built into Gresbeck’s narrative to protect himself. His Victorian editor likes the personality of the adventurous young carpenter that shines through his story, finding in him the voice of the people, full of common sense and shrewd observation, much of it confirmed by other sources. That such an inherently straightforward person felt compelled to take such precautions indicates the hazardous complexity of his world.

  Presumably Count Manderscheid had by this time vouched for Gresbeck, but the commanders were still unsure they could trust him. They had him taken to a large cell, where he was given a quantity of mud and sand and edged tools. He had the next two days, he was told, to construct a scale model of the defenses of Münster. Every gate, every protective ditch, every gun emplacement, every guard position had to be represented. Henry Gresbeck had grown up in Münster and had been involved in the city’s defense for more than a year. He was, as his narrative reveals, keenly observant. He had made his living as a carpenter, shaping cabinets, benches, and chairs out of raw wood. And he was doubtless very eager to please. He worked for two solid days on the model, after which the commanders questioned him on its various aspects. Of special interest to them was the approach by way of the Holy Cross Gate where Gresbeck had stood guard.

  In order to be certain that he was telling the truth, Wilhelm Steding and another officer, Lenz von der Horst, took Gresbeck, still under close guard and in chains, to the moat that night. The chains were removed and, while the others waited, Gresbeck “lowered himself into the moat, swam across it, and crept through the underbrush to the wall.” None of the Anabaptists on the watch detected him; he disappeared through the
wall and in a few minutes came out again. He swam across the moat and stood before Steding and the others. “If we were armed and ready for an attack with enough soldiers,” he said, “we could take the city right now.” The officers concurred with his judgment. “And thus did the citizen climb out of the moat yet a second time toward the blockhouse,” Gresbeck records; but this time it was finally and abundantly clear to the Junker Wilhelm Steding that he was telling the truth, and that he had all but delivered the city to the Bishop. He did not have to put the chains back on, and was no longer a prisoner.

  A few days later Gresbeck rode with Steding to Bevergen for a conference with the general staff. As they approached the meeting site Steding asked Gresbeck if he knew what had happened to his friend Johann Nagel. He had heard nothing of Hansel since they had escaped two weeks earlier, Gresbeck said. “Where do you think he might be?” Steding asked. “I barely know where I am myself,” the sorely tried young carpenter replied with some asperity, “or where I’m heading. How should I know where Hans has taken himself, or whether he’s alive or dead?” Then Steding said, “I will tell you the truth now. We are going to meet him in Bevergen. Hans has already recommended the same plan of attack as you have.” The two of them would meet with the general staff and between them confirm the approach they had independently recommended.

  So “little Hans in the corner,” far from being sliced into a hundred pieces, was now involved with the general staff in planning the final attack on the New Zion. How did this come to be? According to one version of his story, Hans had been a double agent from the beginning; his fight, imprisonment, and flight from the stockade to Münster had been part of a plan concocted by Wilhelm Steding after the failed August attack, in order to get another man inside the city walls. But it seems more likely that he was just one of those rogues who usually find a way to survive. Kerssenbrück, who knew nothing of Gresbeck or his narrative when he wrote his own account thirty years later, says simply that Hans escaped with another man and made his way to his former commander, Count Meinhardt von Hamm, and gave him the information necessary to take the city with only a few men.