Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/257

 announced it as the will of God that he should be king of all the world and establish the Fifth Monarchy of the Apocalypse. He assumed the pomp and circumstance of royalty, easily crushed an attempt of Knipperdollinck to supplant him, defeated the besiegers with much slaughter on August 30, 1534, when they tried to take the city by storm, and in October sent out twenty-eight apostles to preach the new kingdom to the neighbouring cities. They were armed with Dusentschur's prophecy of ruin for such as did them harm; but almost all were seized and executed, and a young woman, who attempted to play the part of Judith to the Holofernes of the Bishop of Münster, met with a similar fate.

These misfortunes probably dimmed the faith of the besieged in Münster. Although there were thousands of Anabaptists scattered throughout the north of Germany and the Netherlands, their sporadic risings were all suppressed, and no town but Warendorf accepted Munster's proposals of peace. The Württemberg war, which had distracted the Princes of Germany, was over; and the Lübeck war prevented Hanseatic democrats from assisting the people of Münster as effectually as it kept north German Princes from joining the siege. But it was April, 1535, before the mutual jealousies of the various Princes, the dissensions between Catholics and Protestants, the inefficiency of the national military organisation, and the common fear lest Charles V should seize the occasion to extend his Burgundian patrimony at the expense of Germany by appropriating Münster to himself, permitted a joint expedition in aid of the Bishop of Münster, who had hitherto carried on the siege with the help of some Hessian troops. After that the result could not long remain doubtful; but the city offered a stubborn resistance, and it was only by means of treachery that it was taken by assault on the night of June 24. The usual slaughter followed; Jan of Leyden and Knipperdollinck were tortured to death in the market-place with red-hot pincers. Münster was deprived of its privileges as an imperial city; the Bishop's authority and Catholicism were re-established, and a fortress was built to support them. The Anabaptists were dispersed into many lands, and their views exercised a potent influence in England and America in the following century; but the visionary and revolutionary spirit which gave Anabaptism its importance during the German Reformation passed out of it to assume other forms, and Anabaptism slowly became a respectable creed.

Two of the three revolutions which disturbed Germany in 1534-5, the Württemberg war and the Münster insurrection, were thus ended; there remained a third, the attempt of commercial democracy to establish an empire over the shores of the Baltic. The cities of the Hanseatic League had long enjoyed the most complete autonomy, and whatever authority neighbouring Princes and Prelates could claim within the walls of any of them was a mere shadow. Hence the Lutheran Reformation, appealing as it did most powerfully to the burgher class, won an easy