In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

MARIA AND URSULA VAN BECKUM Anabaptism could be the sword of Christ that cut families apart. Sisters­in­ law Maria and Ursula van Beckum were executed for their Anabaptist faith; their mothers bitterly opposed their Anabaptist persuasions and tried desperately to dissuade them. Jan, husband of Ursula and brother to Maria, kept his distance from both women, probably to avoid arrest and examination. He seems to have remained formally Catholic, the safest position for one who wished to retain land and noble rank. One can only briefly recount the salient features of the arrest, interrogation, and death of Maria and Ursula because there is very little information about them in archival collections.1 We are not told anything about their conversion, baptism, and Christian calling. For us they emerge onto an Anabaptist stage only when Maria's mother learned of her daughter's Anabaptist persuasion and drove her from the family house and estate, likely at Beckum a few kilometres south of Hengelo in the province of Overijssel.2 Perhaps the mother thought to shame the daughter into disavowing her new faith. Perhaps she was expressing her own humiliation and loss of honour as a noble lady of some regional prominence. We are not told anything of the family's wealth in land, nor where it ranked within the feudal hierarchy. Neither does Maria's father appear in our story. Maria fled to Utrecht to the home of her brother, Jan, who seems to have taken her in without regret. Their mother unrelentingly sent a police officer searching for her. Gosen van Raesfelt, sheriff of Twenthe, heard Maria and Ursula van Beckum 353 about the refugee Anabaptist and put the governor on her trail. Van Raesfelt was a blood relative, next in line to this family's property, a family whose Anabaptist daughter was unmarried and whose son was childless. If he could have Maria and Ursula caught and removed, he might inherit the van Beckum property, even though he seems to have made no provision for eliminating Jan. His apparent plotting was the subject of gossip by other people of noble blood.3 Early one morning the governor sent out a small posse, surrounded the house of Jan and Ursula, and seized Maria. Surprised and then terrified, she appealed suddenly to her sister­in­law, Ursula, to go with her to what would have been a chilling and unholy prison reception for a young woman. Ursula gained permission from her husband to accompany Maria, though up to this point the story gives us no hint that Ursula herself was a convert to the new faith. The hymn writers praised Ursula's gift of sisterly love, for good reason. As an Anabaptist, she faced certain death herself if she accompanied Maria to prison; had she remained at her home, she might have been able to escape. Maria's mother was vengeful, and tried to force her daughter back into mother church. Ursula's mother and sister, also of noble rank, tried a gentler suasion. They came from their landed estates at Werdum by Esens in East Friesland,4 today the northwestern corner of Germany, to talk her out of her error. They failed to dissuade Ursula, and the hymn record suggests Ursula's break with her mother was an angry one, her exchange of farewells with her sister more peaceful but still bittersweet.5 Maria and Ursula were taken back to Deventer, then to Delden. Interrogations followed, first by a Dominican prior from the monastery at Zwolle.6 Since the thirteenth century the Dominicans had led in inquisitorial proceedings, dubbed by their monastic order rivals "the hounds of the Lord" [domine canes]. He failed miserably and turned nasty. The authorities sent for a distant theologian, called Burgundian in the records, probably from the court in Brussels.7 He fared no better. The two would not be moved, and their examiners were amazed at both their pertinacity and theological skill. Sentencing them to death was inevitable. In 1529 Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had issued a mandate commanding death for all Anabaptists. As King Charles I of Spain and overlord of the Netherlands, he was more earnestly Catholic than the papacy, a man too zealous to let heretics anywhere in his lands slip through his fingers to the peril of his own soul. Surviving records tell us little about the content of the religious examination. The interrogators always asked about baptism­why had they been rebaptized? Both replied crisply that...

Share