And so it was that at the end of May 1535, after fifteen months of expense, humiliation, and frustration, Franz von Waldeck was handed the virtual keys to the city and the destruction of the Company of Christ. His army was not at its earlier strength, numbering now only three thousand men. But his effective enemy amounted to fewer than a thousand men, burdened by thousands of starving and dispirited old people, women, and children. He had the certainty of surprise. And yet he would linger for nearly another full month before launching his final and long-awaited attack.
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ATTACK
Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.
—Matthew 24:9
THE PRINCE-BISHOP, HAVING been twice burned in attempts to take the city, may have delayed now in launching his attack because of news brought by Henry Gresbeck of a formidable final weapon developed by the Anabaptists—at the suggestion of none other than Henry Graes, the schoolmaster of many talents. Graes, when he was still a true believer, had persuaded Jan that he should order the city’s blacksmiths and wheelrights to build a “rolling fortress” of armored wagons with which the Anabaptists could break through the Bishop’s lines to join up with the supporters still anticipated from the Netherlands. The prototype for the wagons had been completed the previous autumn. It was big enough to hold six men. The wheels were rimmed with iron, their spokes turned from ancient, rock-hard oaken flooring from city houses. The shafts, staves, and side panels were wrapped and covered in flattened iron. The wagon was large enough to carry a small cannon, as well as a new weapon designed to allow six or eight of the gigantic, primitive muskets called Hackenbüchse (“arquebus” in French; “harquebus” in English) to be stacked like a horizontal pipe organ and fired at the same time. Special protection was designed for the six horses needed to pull the wagon, but even if they were disabled the smiths had designed a portable spiked metal fence that could be thrown up around it.
By April 1535, there were sixteen wagons standing ready to go in the Cathedral Square. These were, as a later account records, “dangerous war machines, fully armored as they were, behind their protective walls, with cannons, artillery pieces, and their frightening organ pipes. It is hard to imagine that soldiers and horsemen faced by these machine could keep their wits about them or that their own artillery could keep these moving targets in their sights long enough to have an effect.” Henry Gresbeck, overwhelmed by the war wagons when he first saw them, had been convinced that if God did not take a hand against the Anabaptists, nobody could stop them from making their escape.
It was true that escape was no longer a possibility. The supporting armies from the Netherlands that the wagons were to meet would never appear. Thanks to the information provided by Henry Graes, Jan van Geelen had been killed in Amsterdam, and three shiploads of other militants had been intercepted by the Duke of Guelders. And in any event, the horses needed to pull the wagons had all been eaten. The wagons remained as formidable weapons of defense, however, a veritable fortress within the city, King Jan’s potential last redoubt.
The Bishop continued to hope for surrender in lieu of an expensive assault, but his own behavior toward those who had already surrendered, or tried to surrender, could not have been encouraging. Von Dhaun, seeing how ruthless the Bishop intended to be, had finally tried in vain to persuade the Anabaptists not to expel any more of their people. Jan replied that they were not forcing anybody to leave, and that the Bishop could do with them as he pleased.
Final estimates of the numbers involved were fifteen hundred men and women expelled or departed from Münster, not counting numerous children. Of these, between six hundred and seven hundred unarmed men were killed in the field or executed in a four-week period. The Bishop had far too much work for his own executioner to handle, including killing fourteen women, so he engaged the services of executioners from Osnabrück and Arnsberg. They came willingly. But a third man, from the city of Bielefeld, was repelled by von Waldeck’s evident lust for blood. He responded to the Bishop’s command to report for duty by saying he would rather give up his job entirely than participate in such a shameless bloodbath.
Being faced with a Bishop so brutal that he is rebuked by a professional executioner understandably hardened the resistance ofJan and his supporters; as rebels and heretics they could expect no mercy. Neither were they inclined to grant it to their own disenchanted followers, as the story of Elizabeth Wandscheer, perhaps the most famous to emerge from the long saga of the Company of Christ, would vividly demonstrate.
Elizabeth was the blond and beautiful daughter of Bernard Wandscheer, a blacksmith. She had been married at nineteen years of age by force after the king’s decree of polygamy to a man named Reiner Hardwick and had tried unsuccessfully to run away from him, through the city gate. Hardwick had then died, and her father had arranged for her to be married to an old man, cadaverous, pockmarked, and bald, one August Cloterbernd. One day in the late fall of 1534, as the king was holding court in the Cathedral Square, Elizabeth was brought to him for judgment, arms bound behind her, by her father and her new husband. Bernard Wandscheer complained that his daughter had been disobedient to him and that he should be allowed to punish her. August Cloterbernd went further. He said that Elizabeth, though she was his pledged wife, had told him she would sooner sleep in the bushes than with him. He asked that King Jan pronounce on this rebellious woman an appropriate judgment. Jan asked Elizabeth if she had married Cloterbernd of her own free will. She asked, according to Helmut Paulus’s version of the story, how anybody could think that a young woman might want to marry such a stinking old goat; she would rather be three feet under the ground. The king reprimanded the old man and the girl’s father for imposing their will on her unfairly, and had her imprisoned in the Rosenthal for disobedience. A few days later she became his tenth wife. Beautiful, spirited, and brave, Elizabeth was Jan’s favorite wife, after Queen Divara.
But in early May, Elizabeth had grown difficult. Accounts varied. Some said she had been disturbed by the sad fate of the refugees Jan had turned away from the city gates. Others said she had protested the starvation that was evident all around them while she and the other members of the court were allowed to eat all they wished. Whatever the cause, the various accounts agree that Elizabeth reproached Jan for his inhumanity and demanded to be allowed to leave him and the city. Outraged at her ingratitude and her temerity, Jan led her to the Market Square and, before the other wives and the assembled throng that had been summoned, condemned her to death.
Helmut Paulus, adding a novelist’s insight to the documents describing this incident, imagines Elizabeth’s last moments as she hears the king say, “‘God has commanded that you must die. This is the same test that Abraham faced; I cannot escape it.’ How strange those words sound to the young woman. Her lips draw back in scorn, but her eyes are shocked when she looks into the face of the king who stands before her, his back to the crowd. His eyes gleam with animal savagery; his lips are pulled back from his teeth. In great fear she tries to stretch out her hands against the truth now revealed in his face that a mask had previously hidden, but her hands are bound behind her. She wants to scream, but she is gagged. She sees how the king takes the sword from the hand of Master Niland. Her hands are unbound and she is lifted with inhuman strength and forced to kneel with her head on a block. She clasps her hands before her as she hears King Jan reproach the other wives. ‘Why don’t you sing? Sing!’ She hears the frightened voices of the women, weakly, like an exhalation, singing ‘In Excelsis Deo,’ ‘Glory to God in the highest’. She sees a flash of light, feels a terrible pain, and drops into a dark sea. All now is peaceful and dark.”
Several graphic sketches of the king dancing with his other wives around the headless corpse of Elizabeth Wandscheer have come down to us as perhaps the most vivid documentation of his depravity, and it was this incident more than any other that led serious observers to see Jan as ind
eed the devil in human shape. But perhaps the true devil in this scene is the one omitted by Paulus in his reconstruction—the former Catholic priest, Bernard Rothmann, who looked on as the king and his court danced and said, “Glory to God in the highest!”
On June 8, a delegation from Prince Philip was allowed by King Jan to approach the Judefeld Gate with a final offer to settle the siege without an assault—so that, as a modern writer puts it, the Bishop could avoid appearing bloodthirsty. Jan met the delegation, accompanied by Rothmann, Knipperdolling, and the Elders. The delegation handed Jan a theological tract opposing the Kingdom of Münster and asked him if he would be willing to give up the city and beg the Bishop for mercy. “Ask me in a year,” the king laughed.
Count von Dhaun ordered a final reconnaissance of the secret approach to the city by Gresbeck and Hansel, along with a dozen officers and men. Once again, Gresbeck proved that they could enter the city undetected, and the commanders began to set in motion the plans for their final attack. It would take place on the night of June 22. The officers and men were promised their fair share of the booty and told to prepare themselves for battle. This time, however, made wise by experience, Count von Dhaun announced that he was forbidding, on pain of death, the sale and drinking of liquor, including beer and wine.
All through the afternoon and evening of the summer solstice, June 22, heavy thunderstorms rolled over Münster, pounding the city with sheets of wind-driven rain mixed with hail the size of hen’s eggs. The outer-wall guards were driven from their exposed positions into the earthen bunkers at the base of the wall where, cold and hungry, they huddled by a charcoal fire and slept, waiting out the storm. If they had been at their posts, the intermittent brilliant flashes of lightning would have revealed unusual activity near the blockhouses beyond the outer moat. Scores of peasants, impressed as laborers for the occasion, were unloading storming ladders and portable sectioned bridges brought from the armory at Wolbeck. Five hundred soldiers, volunteers who would again be paid twice their usual wage for daring to use the ladders, watched and waited, cold and wet but sober, for the signal to attack.
An hour before midnight, Gresbeck and Hansel Eck wrestled one of the bridges into position along the edge of the moat. Gresbeck secured one end of a rope to the bridge and slipped into the cold water. Tugging the heavy coil of rope, he paddled to the other side, climbed out, and fixed the rope with an iron hook to a post in the wall. The twenty-foot bridge, two sections hinged at the middle, had swung with the mild current so that it lay parallel to the opposite bank. Hansel pushed the end of the bridge away from him with a long spear. Gresbeck pulled it toward him and secured it by snubbing the rope to the post. Hansel ran across the bridge, carrying a ladder that he propped against the wall.
Wilhelm Steding, who would command the raid, then led thirty-five of his soldiers across the bridge, one at a time, as Gresbeck stood chest-high at the edge of the moat to keep it steady. The only sound was the creaking of the bridge and the rustle of muffled swords brushing against leather jerkins and body armor; all communication was done by sign and low whispers. The soldiers brought with them several other ladders to place beside Hansel’s. Gresbeck was left behind to watch as they followed Hansel up the wall.
The guard post on the wall was empty. The soldiers climbed down and surprised the dozen sleeping guards in their bunker, killing them all instantly with quick knife thrusts. Through the pelting rain, they dashed across the stone bridge that spanned the inner moat toward a small door at the base of the Holy Cross Gate. Hansel opened this door with a key that he had copied earlier. Inside this door, which opened into a tunnel that led to the gate tower, Steding’s men found only one guard, a frightened furrier named Bernard Schulte who quickly revealed the password for the day to the soldiers: “Earth.”
So far no alarms had sounded. Steding sent a man back to the outer moat, ordering the rest of his force to cross over. When the bridge broke in the middle, the back-up bridge was put into service, with Gresbeck again swimming the moat. This would be his final contribution to the attack, he realized sadly as he watched the last of the three hundred and fifty soldiers disappear up the ladders and over the wall. He wanted to go with them but he was still a prisoner, not as fully trusted as he had earlier thought. He was to remain where he was, without weapon or armor, alone again between opposing forces. One of the soldiers, taking pity on the shivering carpenter, tossed him his Spanish cloak.
Beyond the outer wall waited the main force of Ulrich von Dhaun, about three thousand men. The plan was for Steding to advance silently, in three separate formations, to the Cathedral, which had been turned into the city arsenal, and to capture it. The Anabaptists, weakened from hunger and frightened, would presumably be thrown into a panic by the loss of their armory and by the sudden onslaught of four hundred assault troops—not more than eight hundred men in the city were now capable of fighting and most of them would be asleep. Anticipating opposition from no more than two hundred panicked defenders, Steding would then open the Holy Cross Gate and others to von Dhaun’s main force and the city would be theirs.
Steding’s men quietly made their way through the Overwater Church Square and across the small stone bridge that led to the Cathedral Square. They overwhelmed the guards at the Cathedral and secured several cannons within, which they wheeled to the entrance and aimed onto the square. It was not yet midnight—all of this had happened in less than an hour—and so far all had gone well; they had only to leave a few men behind to guard the armory and then to return to open the gates to von Dhaun. Within minutes, however, Steding heard alarm trumpets sounding and saw a large force of armed Anabaptists, more than twice their own number, charging across the square under the protection of cannon fire from St. Margaret’s Chapel. Steding trained his captured cannons on the chapel but the balls bounced harmlessly from the heavy stone walls into the street.
Rather than be trapped in the Cathedral, Steding led his men into the winding streets of the south quarter, fighting a delaying action. He assumed that when von Dhaun heard the sounds of heavy fighting and saw that the gates were not swinging open, he would comprehend the advance force’s danger and send his men through the tunnel that Steding had used. But Steding had erred seriously. Known as a kind and forgiving friend but a terrible enemy, he was one of the Bishop’s best soldiers. He had nonetheless failed to leave a small force behind by the door to the Holy Cross Gate to aid von Dhaun’s assault. The open, unattended door had been discovered, as had the bodies of the overwhelmed watchmen at the outer wall, as Steding was securing the Cathedral.
Von Dhaun, in the meantime, heard the fighting within the city but hesitated to attack. One account suggests he feared that Hansel had led Steding into a trap, and that Gresbeck was in on it. He was afraid that yet a third disastrous assault was in the making, and he refused to move without assurance that he had not been betrayed.
Steding was now indeed trapped in a blind alley off Margaret Street, but through no fault of Hansel or Gresbeck. The intrepid four hundred were cornered and desperate to escape, suffering not only the bullets and arrows of Jan’s men but the indignity of pots and chairs and bed-warming bricks dropped by the women and children who lived in the apartments above them. Steding forced his way through a nearby house and out the back door; leaving half his men behind, he took the other half and surprised the attacking Anabaptists from the rear. Thinking that Steding had been reinforced, Jan’s men fled. Disaster had been narrowly averted.
Steding took up a more secured secure defensive position, waiting for von Dhaun’s appearance or a second Anabaptist assault. Neither occurred. Instead, he heard Jan van Leyden’s voice identify himself as king; he was, Jan said, declaring an unconditional cease-fire. He wanted to negotiate. Steding considered his situation. It was now well after midnight. The storm had ended and the fighting was at an ebb; it was too dark to see without torches, and anyone carrying a torch was a sure target. In the distance they could hear the women shrieking defiance from the w
alls to the waiting army.
Steding agreed to the cease-fire. Jan said he would let them all go free if they would kneel before him and beg his forgiveness. Steding stalled for time, saying he needed to look after his wounded. He sent his young aide, Johann von Twickel, on a special mission while he pretended to negotiate. It was still four hours until dawn.
As first light broke over the city, Jan and Steding were still negotiating. Then, in the distance, from the vicinity of the Jodefeld Gate, both sides could hear a single voice loudly calling out. Johann von Twickel was on top of the inner wall, waving the Bishop’s flag and shouting to the gray, massed forces of von Dhaun who were waiting beyond the outher moat to attack. “To Waldeck!” he yelled, “To Waldeck! Münster is ours! Charge! Charge!” Moved at last to action, von Dhaun’s men easily scaled the once-formidable walls as the women left their boiling vats of pitch and lime in a panic. Steding’s men, hearing the commotion at the gates, charged Jan’s forces as they ran to meet the new and greater danger. Caught between Steding and von Dhaun, the Anabaptists broke and fled. The discipline that had enabled the Company of Christ to repel the Bishop for nearly a year and a half had collapsed within minutes, as though a bubble had popped. The siege of Münster was over.
But the fighting was not. Most of the noncombatants fled into their houses, but there were around eight hundred armed men to hunt down and kill, and individually or in groups they put up a stiff resistance. Tile Bussenmeister, the Cyclops, single-handedly held the Aa Bridge against an onslaught of soldiers with spears, halberds, and knives until he was finally overwhelmed and his body thrown into the river. When the Market Square was taken, four defenders held the tower of St. Lambert’s Church; soldiers fought their way up the narrow tower steps and killed three of them; the fourth threw himself from the tower onto the spears of the soldiers below. As the fighting swirled through the streets of the city, hundreds of men died rather than surrender.
The Tailor-King Page 19