The Tailor-King

by Anthony Arthur

  Whatever the cause, we can be certain that King Jan was shocked when, on a day in late September while he was passing his customary judgments on sinners, Knipperdolling appeared in the Market Square, spittle dripping from his chin, crying, “Repent! Repent of your sins, all of you, for the Lord sees and knows of your evil ways!” He rolled in the muck and dung of the street before the astonished court and the crowd of townspeople who were gathered to witness the king’s decisions. He rose and leaped like a hare over the heads of some bystanders, according to the rather implausible story picked up by Kerssenbrück, and began to roam through the crowd. He had the ability to cure blindness, he cried; he spat upon his fingers and rubbed them across the sightless eyes of some old people, saying, “You are chosen! You are holy! You will see!” When they failed to respond, he began to crawl on all fours like a dog, then jumped up and began to dance in a grotesque and lascivious fashion, saying, “I have often danced this way before my women, and now the heavenly father commands me to do the same before my king.” He danced around, his face pale, his breath gasping. He stood on his head. He jumped between the wives on the bench beside the king and went among the men and women of Jan’s court and blessed them, kissing them and saying, “You are saved! God has saved you!” He said to the king, who was struck dumb by this apparition, “Good day to you, my king! It was revealed to me last night that I am a fool!”

  The king, Kerssenbrück says, was so astounded that he “fell from his throne, as did the scepter from his hand, and he clasped his hands and sat where he was” in silent wonder, as if he had been struck dumb. The wives were all thrown into a panic as well. When Knipperdolling saw that the king had fallen, he ran toward him, wrapped his slender body in his big arms, and lifted him upon his throne again. He grabbed a halbard from a nearby guard and raised it high, saying, “Courage, brother! We go together, the king’s fool and the fool-king, to do battle with the world!” The king, as Gresbeck puts it, regained some control of himself and said, with a quavering voice, “Dear sisters and brothers, you should all go home and pray”—but then losing control of his glib tongue, in unprecedented fashion, he began to stutter so fiercely that it sounded as though he was saying “g-g-g God knows, g-g-g-God gives you l-l-l-leave to g-g-g-go to your h-h-h-house.” Knipperdolling, unabashed, reproached the king insolently, saying Jan should have said “brothers and sisters,” not the other way around: “That’s not the way I taught you, is it?” The crisis was momentarily averted, though, as the people obeyed Jan’s feeble command, wandering off muttering to themselves.

  But on the king’s next judgment day, Knipperdolling (unaccountably left at large by Jan) resumed the same act, much more aggressively than before. This time he pushed in front of Jan and sat himself on the king’s throne. “By rights I should also be a king,” he said to Jan. “I made you king!” Jan turned and walked away from the Market Square, in full view of the crowd. Baring Gould has a lively but fictitious reading of what then followed. Turning back to Knipperdolling, “John of Leyden sprang at him, dragged him from the throne, beat his head with his golden scepter, and administering a kick to the rear of his lieutenant, sent him flying head over heels from the platform, and then, calmly enthroning himself, he gave orders for the removal and imprisonment of the rebel.” What actually happened, according to Gresbeck, is that Jan left the throne and the Market Square to return to his palace. The confused cloth merchant remained on the throne, but stepped down quietly when Jan soon returned and asserted his rights. As his guards took his former right-hand man off to the Rosenthal prison, presumably to be executed, Jan told the people that such rebellion could not be permitted; the merchant had taken leave of his senses and would be confined until a decision as to his fate had been reached. Knipperdolling remained in prison for three months, kept alive by virtue of his former eminence in the city. He was released finally and reinstated in Jan’s court after he made a public acknowledgment that an evil spirit had taken possession of him, and he knew well now that Jan had been chosen as the King of the World.

  A recent scholar argues that Knipperdolling was taking a calculated risk, trying to overthrow Jan and to assume the leadership himself because he could see that the King’s course was leading them all to destruction. This seems possible. However, a modern perspective on Knipperdolling’s peculiar actions would have to include the possibility of a rare form of epilepsy. This violent form of the disease has been known since ancient times as “the falling sickness,” with the falling preceded by wildly erratic physical movements and foaming at the mouth and followed by deep states of unconsciousness. It often involves wild mood swings and temper tantrums, resulting in “misconduct of varying degrees of seriousness”; the misdeeds are often forgotten entirely by the victim, leaving him puzzled as to the reactions they have provoked. It also is frequently linked to mystical, visionary, and religious experiences. Both Knipperdolling and Jan Matthias had exhibited these forms of behavior earlier, as had King Jan, though rather less convincingly.

  ANABAPTISTS BATHING. Sexual license and profligacy were among the most deadly charges against the Anabaptists. especially after King Jan instituted polygamy in Münster and himself took sixteen women as wives. This ambiguous portrayal of an Anabaptist bathing scene was adapted by a later artist from an illustration by Heinrich Aldegrever. a sympathizer. A combination of innocent domestic images seems to celebrate the joy of the body in an atmosphere of communal bliss, even as more suggestive actions occur in the foreground and perhaps among those leaving by the stairs at the rear.

  FRANZ VON WALDECK. The Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck (1491-1553) was not only not ordained but was married, and had a mistress as well; like many so-called “prince-bishops” in Germany during this period, he owed his station to politics rather than to religion. and was if anything more sympathetic to the Protestant cause than to the Catholic. But when the city of Münster, in the heart of his realm, openly defied him he had no choice but to bring it to heel, though that task took him more than a year and drove him deeply into debt. The menacing militance of the prince’s sword and the armor are clearly more significant than the bishop’s regalia.

  KING JAN. The dominant element in the painting other than the face of the king is his coat of arms, a a globe pierced by the two crossed swords symbolizing revenge and spirit. with a cross above. The pierced globe appears at the end of the large gold chain above Jan’s left wrist and again. much enlarged. in the upper left corner. beneath his crown. The inscription above Jan’s head reads, “Jan van Leyden. King of the Anabaptists in Münster, truly rendered.” The inscription beneath the painting is a mixture of Latin, (Greek. and Low German, and says. “This was my image and these my royal vestments when I held the scepter.I. the King of the Anabaptists, though only For a short time./Heinrich Aldegrever of Soest did this in 1536./In God’s power is my strength.”

  THE SIEGE OF MÜNSTER, 1534. Other than depicting hills, this is a reliable approximation of the siege, according to the Münster Catalog description. Note the double moat and the defensive palisades: the cannon shot emanating from the Cathedral tower; and even the execution of the Mollenheck rebels in the Market Square. Outside the walls we see a confusing but rich display: tents, wagons, marching soldiers, burning windmills, cannons protected by round screens woven from rushes, wives cooking—even, in the lower right corner, a soldier attending to some private business.

  BERNARD KNIPPERDOLLING. In addition to his painting of King Jan, Heinrich Aldegrever’s other celebrated portrait is of the cloth merchant Bernard Knipperdolling, Münster’s leading businessman, who became Jan’s sword-bearer and second-in-command. The title reads, “A True Likeness of Bernard Knipperdolling, one of the twelve princes of Münster,” an incorrect statement according to a later commentator. The subtitle reads, in effect, “This is how I, Bernard Knipperdolling, appeared, when I was at my peak. Heinrich Aldegrever did this picture in 1536.”

  KNIPPERDOLLING CAPERING BEFORE KING JAN. Jan van Leyden’s story was retold for
many years in Holland. This late seventeenth-century representation by a Dutch artist describes the episode when Knipperdolling plays the fool to Jan’s king, perhaps as a challenge to the young usurper of his authority—a vivid contrast with the characterization above.

  THE MOLLENHECK REBELLION. In July 1534, Jan’s decree of polygamy provoked Henry Mollenheck, a prominent guild leader and long-time citizen of Münster, to lead a revolt against the king. He captured Jan and some of his followers but then surrendered after a counterattack. He and about fifty of his men were publicly murdered as depicted in this powerful rough drawing and buried in a mass grave.

  KING JAN EXECUTES ELIZABETH WANDSCHEER.

  Near the end of his reign one of Jan’s wives, Elizabeth Wandscheer, rebelled against his authority. He beheaded her in the Cathedral square, then danced around her body with his other wives, singing Anabaptist hymns. These illustrations by the Dutch artist Lambertus Hortensius are typical of the many that depict this notorious episode.

  THE KING AND HIS OTHER WIVES CELEBRATE THE DEATH.

  Sigmund Freud’s disciple Ernest Jones, in his book On the Nightmare, provides a related insight. Less well known than nightmares, Jones wrote, are “daymares,” which cause their victims to behave in extraordinary ways completely at variance with their normal behavior. One of the many examples Jones provides describes a patient who says “daymares” are worse than nightmares, “stealing upon me while in perfect possession of my faculties; … [I] have undergone the greatest tortures, being haunted by specters, hags, and every sort of phantom—having, at the same time, a full consciousness that I was laboring under an incubus.” If ever a man seemed to be “laboring under an incubus,” it was Knipperdolling.

  Whatever the cause of Knipperdolling’s behavior—jealous rage, madness, physical illness, political calculation—it must have seemed symbolic to some of those who witnessed it of a deeper disorder, not only in him but in the Company of Christ. He had been a moral anchor in years past, a good man, generous to the poor, brave in opposing injustice. Now he had become first an executioner and finally a pathetic yet dangerous madman. Similarly, everything in the world of the Anabaptists in Münster had become reversed, inverted, turned upside-down, with a new version of the Ten Commandments in force: Thou shalt kill, thou shalt bear false witness, thou shalt commit adultery.

  And thou shalt give up thy life for suggesting that this new order is not God’s way.

  8

  THE RETURN OF HENRY GRAES

  I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way.

  —Exodus 23:20

  THE LAME PROPHET, Johann Dusentschur, had begun to preach in early October that soon the Company of Christ would hear the Lord sound His trumpets three times; this dreaded yet longed-for signal would summon the people to gather in the Cathedral Square, or Mount Zion, to be taken to the Promised Land.

  An hour before dawn on Saturday, October, 23, all the men, women, and children of Münster were called from their beds not by trumpets but by the hollow, mournful sound of a cow horn blown from the tower of St. Lambert’s Church by the limping prophet, then repeated as he and others ranged through the streets with horns and flutes. The people responded with fearful yet practiced haste. The men dressed for battle, many wearing light chain mail fashioned in the city’s forges, while their wives dressed and comforted their frightened children. Thousands of people then stumbled through the dark streets, most of them heavily burdened. The men carried every weapon they owned—swords, knives, pikestaffs, halberds, harquebuses, longbows, and quivers of arrows—while the women shouldered whatever they could manage of their meager possessions, suspecting they would never see their homes again. Many of the women carried nursing babies and were trailed by whimpering, terrified children. The aged, the lame, the infirm limped tentatively over the frosted cobblestones, importuning gray-robed preachers like Henry Graes, the schoolmaster, and Johann Shaffer, who had been a wooden-shoe maker, for explanations. But the preachers only responded with brusque shakes of the head to anxious questions about what was happening; they knew no more than any other humble member of the Company of Christ what was afoot.

  In the Cathedral Square, the people clustered around the dozen bonfires that eased the morning chill and waited for instructions from King Jan. They had been told many times to expect this day, the Day of Judgment, when they would go forth to do battle with the Bishop’s army and either destroy it or be themselves taken into the Kingdom of Heaven. They had been warned to bring with them no more than they could carry, for if they succeeded in their holy battle they would leave the city behind to carry the truth into the world. If they failed, they would not need earthly possessions.

  In practical terms, the men knew that now might be the best time to challenge the Bishop. His mighty army had drifted away after the great defeat in August, and fewer than three thousand men now stood between the Chosen Ones and freedom. The threatened blockhouses and their linking fortifications had not yet been completed, and would not unduly hinder their departure. But the city’s fortifications were stronger than ever, and it frightened all but the boldest to think of leaving them to attack a force twice their own number of fifteen hundred battle-ready men. What did Jan have in mind?

  The king kept his subjects waiting in fear and trembling for more than an hour, until just after the sun rose. Then the sound of trumpets announced his arrival; from the courtyard of the von Buren mansion slowly marched the royal procession. At its head was Jan’s white stallion, its golden reins held by a purple-liveried page. The king sat straight and stern, wearing full armor and holding his sword erect in his right hand. In lieu of his helmet, which along with his spear was carried by another page who rode behind him, he wore his golden crown. The twenty young men who formed the king’s bodyguard rode slightly behind him on either side, spreading out in a protective wake. Queen Divara followed in an open coach, attended by her ladies in waiting and the fifteen lesser wives.

  The people waited for Jan to speak, but he sat in stony silence. A company of soldiers galloped into the square, escorting two flagbearers who carried pennants emblazoned with the king’ crest, the world pierced by a sword. The captain of the troop, Gerlach von Wullen, approached the king and begged permission to speak to the people. Permission was granted. It was, everyone knew, the dashing young nobleman von Wullen who would lead the charge against the Bishop, and they anticipated now that he would order the men to their posts for the attack. “Our Lord, the just King of Kings,” Gerlach shouted, “has ordered you to prepare for the final battle, and He is pleased to see that you are ready. But today is not to be the day. The Lord has revealed to King Jan that such is not His will, that today has been a test of your will and your readiness to obey. The Lord is well pleased with you,” von Wullen continued as sighs of relief spread through the multitude at their deliverance. “As a sign of His pleasure, He has ordered that a great feast be prepared for you.” The people were told to return to their houses and make themselves ready for the feast which would begin at noon in the Cathedral Square.

  During all this time King Jan had not spoken a word. Now he nodded to his page, who turned the white stallion toward the palace, and was led silently from the square.

  The feast began as promised. Everyone except for those on guard sat down to the tables assembled in the square. The sun blazed from the blue autumn sky on men and women hoisting tankards of dark beer as the court musicians played lively drinking songs and the cooks turned roasting pigs on their spits. All of these people had been spared from probable death only hours before, and their relief was almost palpable. The king himself, earlier so stern and distant, now strolled among the crowd, a warm and kindly smile on his face, looking like the youth he was but wearing his golden crown and his scarlet robe. His darkly beautiful queen walked beside him, her fingers resting lightly on his arm.

  As they completed their passage through the square, Jan called his preachers to him and called for silence. He wished the people to hear tha
t he, King Jan, and his royal court and the Elders would now serve the people with their own hands. And this they did, through the warm afternoon. Boiled beef and turnips made up the first course, followed by ham and green beans, and at last the roast pigs. Beer and wine flowed unceasingly, and by the end of the afternoon the Company of Christ was fully sated.

  As the evening approached, the mood turned more solemn. It was time for communion, one of the Roman Catholic sacraments that had often been parodied by the Anabaptists. The preachers brought wafers on silver plates to the King and his court. Jan took a wafer and ate it, saying, “I eat this and show forth the death of the Lord.” Then he drank from the silver chalice handed to him by Queen Divara, saying, “I drink this and show forth the death of the Lord.” All of the adults in the square filed before Jan and Divara and the preachers and participated in this surprisingly devout and traditional communion.

  When the communion was concluded, Jan climbed upon the table where he had been seated and slowly, with great deliberateness of movement, removed first his crown, then his golden chain, and placed them next to his scepter at his feet. Shorn of his royal symbols, he looked out upon his people and began to speak, in a broken voice and with tears running down his cheeks. Shocked into silence, the people heard Jan say that he was not worthy to be their king. He had been remiss in his duty to wield the sword and to punish the godless and the evildoers. He had failed them as their king.