A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

The severest persecutions, however, before the rule of Philip II., were reserved for those people who are called the Anabaptists.[241] We find several edicts directed against them solely. In February 1532 it was forbidden to harbour Anabaptists, and a price of 12 guilders was offered to informants. Later in the same year an edict was published which declared “that all who had been rebaptized, were sorry for their fault, and, in token of their repentance, had gone to confession, would be admitted to mercy for that time only, provided they brought a certificate from their confessor within twenty-four days of the date of the edict; those who continued obdurate were to be treated with the utmost rigour of the laws” (Feb. 1533). Anabaptists who had abjured were ordered to remain near their dwelling-places for the space of a year, “unless those who were engaged in the herring fishery” (June 1534). In 1535 the severest edict against the sect was published. All who had “seduced or perverted any to this sect, or had rebaptized them,” were to suffer death by fire; all who had suffered themselves to be rebaptized, or who had harboured Anabaptists, and who recanted, were to be favoured by being put to death by the sword; women were “only to be buried alive.”[242]

To understand sympathetically that multiform movement which was called in the sixteenth century Anabaptism, it is necessary to remember that it was not created by the Reformation, although it certainly received an impetus from the inspiration of the age. Its roots can be traced back for some centuries, and its pedigree has at least two stems which are essentially distinct, and were only occasionally combined. The one stem is the successions of the Brethren, a mediæval, anti-clerical body of Christians whose history is written only in the records of Inquisitors of the mediæval Church, where they appear under a variety of names, but are universally said to prize the Scriptures and to accept the Apostles’ Creed.[243] The other existed in the continuous uprisings of the poor—peasants in rural districts and the lower classes in the towns—against the rich, which were a feature of the later Middle Ages.[244]

So far as the Netherlands are concerned, these popular outbreaks had been much more frequent among the towns’ population than in the rural districts. The city patriciate ordinarily controlled the magistracy; but when flagrant cases of oppression arose, all the judicial, financial, and other functions of government were sure to be swept out of their hands in an outburst of popular fury. So much was this the case, that the real holders of power in the towns in the Netherlands during the first half of the sixteenth century were the artisans, strong in their trade organisations. They had long known their power, and had been accustomed to exert it. The blood of a turbulent ancestry ran in their veins—of men who could endure for a time, but who, when roused by serious oppression, had been accustomed to defend themselves, and to give stroke for stroke. It is only natural to find among the artisans of the Flemish and Dutch towns a curious mingling of sublime self-sacrifice for what they believed to be the truth, of the mystical exaltation of the martyr occasionally breaking out in hysterical action, and the habit of defending themselves against almost any odds.

So far as is known, the earliest Anabaptist martyrs were Jan Walen and two others belonging to Waterlandt. They were done to death in a peculiarly atrocious way at The Hague in 1527. Instead of being burnt alive, they were chained to a stake at some distance from a huge fire, and were slowly roasted to death. This frightful punishment seems to have been reserved for the Anabaptist martyrs. It was repeated at Haarlem in 1532, when a woman was drowned and her husband with two others was roasted alive. Some time in 1530, Jan Volkertz founded an Anabaptist congregation in Amsterdam which became so large as to attract the attention of the authorities. The head of the police (schout) in the city was ordered to apprehend them. Volkertz delivered himself up voluntarily. The greater part of the accused received timely warning from the schout’s wife. Nine were taken by night in their beds. These with their pastor were carried to The Hague and beheaded by express order of the Emperor. He also commanded that their heads should be sent to Amsterdam, where they were set on poles in a circle, the head of Volkertz being in the centre. This ghastly spectacle was so placed that it could be seen from the ships entering and leaving the harbour. All these martyrs, and many others whose deaths are duly recorded, were followers of Melchior Hoffman. Hoffman’s views were those of the “Brethren” of the later Middle Ages, the Old Evangelicals as they were called. In a paper of directions sent to Emden to assist in the organisation of an Anabaptist congregation there, he says:

“God’s community knows no head but Christ. No other can be endured, for it is a brother- and sisterhood. The teachers have none who rule them spiritually but Christ. Teachers and ministers are not lords. The pastors have no authority except to preach God’s Word and punish sins. A bishop must be elected out of his community. Where a pastor has thus been taken, and the guidance committed to him and to his deacon, a community should provide properly for those who help to build the Lord’s house. When teachers are thus found, there is no fear that the communities will suffer spiritual hunger. A true preacher would willingly see the whole community prophesy.”

But the persecution, with its peculiar atrocities, had been acting in its usual way on the Anabaptists of the Netherlands. They had been tortured on the rack, scourged, imprisoned in dungeons, roasted to death before slow fires, and had seen their women drowned, buried alive, pressed into coffins too small for their bodies till their ribs were broken, others stamped into them by the feet of the executioners. It is to be wondered at that those who stood firm sometimes gave way to hysterical excesses; that their leaders began to preach another creed than that of passive resistance; that wild apocalyptic visions were reported and believed?

Melchior Hoffman had been imprisoned in Strassburg in 1533, and a new leader arose in the Netherlands—Jan Matthys, a baker of Haarlem. Under his guidance an energetic propaganda was carried on in the Dutch towns, and hundreds of converts were made. One hundred persons were baptized in one day in February (1534); before the end of March it was reported that two-thirds of the population in Monnikendam were Anabaptists; and a similar state of matters existed in many of the larger Dutch towns. Deventer, Zwolle, and Kampen were almost wholly Anabaptist. The Government made great exertions to crush the movement. Detachments of soldiers were divided into bands of fifteen or twenty, and patrolled the environs of the cities, making midnight visitations, and haling men and women to prison until the dungeons were overcrowded with captured Anabaptists.

Attempts were made by the persecuted to leave the country for some more hospitable place where they could worship God in peace in the way their consciences directed them. East Friesland had once been a haven, but was so no longer. Münster offered a refuge. Ships were chartered,—thirty of them,—and the persecuted people proposed to sail round the north of Friesland, land at the mouth of the Ems, and travel to Münster by land.[245] The Emperor’s ships intercepted the little fleet, sank five of the vessels with all the emigrants on board, and compelled the rest to return. The leaders found on board were decapitated, and their heads stuck on poles to warn others. Hundreds from the provinces of Guelderland and Holland attempted the journey by land. They piled their bits of poor furniture and bundles of clothes on waggons; some rode horses, most trudged on foot, the women and children, let us hope, getting an occasional ride on the waggons. Soldiers were sent to intercept them. The leaders were beheaded, the men mostly imprisoned, and the women and children sent back to their towns and villages.