MUNSTER REBELLION, The, Sylvester Hassell After most of the Anabaptist ministers had suffered martyrdom or died of the plague, the able but fanatical Melchior Hoffman,of Sweden (from 1529 to 1534), acquired great influence over the Anabaptists in the Netherlands and Germany, and instilled his false and exciting Manichaean and Millenarian views into the minds of many. Two of his disciples, John Matthiesen, of Harlem, and John Bockhold, of Leydon, went, in 1533, to Munster, in Westphalia, converted large numbers of the people to their views, overturned the city government, and set up what they called the Kingdom of New Zion, and intended to proceed to the conquest of the world.
The city was besieged by an imperial army, and Matthiesen was killed in a sally from the walls. Bockhold made himself king, and inaugurated a diabolical reign of lust and blood, establishing a complete communism both of property and wives, and beheading, sometimes, more than fifty persons in a day. After fifteen months the city was taken; Bockhold and two of his leading associates, Knipperdolling and Krechting were tortured to death with red-hot pincers, and then hung up in iron cages, which are still preserved in Munster.
Similar revolutions were ineffectually attempted in Leyden and Amsterdam. The best historians agree that many of these people, in those times of great change and excitement—when the iron bondage of Roman priestcraft of a thousand years was being relaxed—were affected with religious mania or lunacy, and ought rather to have been confined in straight-waistcoats than to have been executed.
The vicious and criminal excesses of these new so-called Anabaptists were earnestly condemned and repudiated by true Baptists everywhere, who saw and declared that these false prophets who professed to be inspired of God were really inspired of the Devil. The true Baptists of this century, like their brethren of former centuries, were—not licentious and warlike madmen, but—peaceful, harmless, God-fearing, God-serving witnesses for the truth.
Why, in the very first year of the sixteenth century, when Luther and Zwingli were schoolboys, there were, besides the Waldenses in Italy, France and Holland, and the Wycliffites in England, two hundred churches of the Bobemian Brethren in Germany (to whom the careful and exact Gieseler and Keller trace the Anabaptists), who were not only virtuous and blameless, but such true and loyal subjects of the Prince of Peace that they were utterly opposed to war, and who, during this century, though grievously persecuted, by thousands, robbed, imprisoned, tortured, driven with their wives and children from their homes to woods and deserts, yet declared that they would rather die than raise a hand, much less a weapon, against their enemies. (Hassell’s History pg 503)