Tag Archives: 1562

1562: Sophie Harmansdochter, “Gele Fye”

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Sophie Harmansdochter, aka Gele Fye, a notorious fink, was executed at The Hague on this date in 1562.

She was the daughter of an Anabaptist martyr, but where she might have taken her heritance in zeal for the evangelium she settled instead for for taking the contact list. By 1537, three years after her father lost her head for the faith, Harmansdochter was informing on his ex-associates; resulting in several more executions and several hundred guilders’ worth of rewards. As late as 1552-53 her information triggered Mennonite hunts across the Low Countries touching not only Amsterdam but Leiden, Friesland, and Antwerp.

This was also about the time when her husband died and left her with four whelps to raise, and the need for her pieces of silver became extremely pressing. But in a pattern similar to many witch hunt informers, Gele Fye’s snitching was abruptly terminated by attempting to point the finger at a person of actual power — namely the former mayor of Amsterdam, who had also once been her paymaster. She was arrested as a perjurer in 1556 and spent six years in prison in The Hague, giving birth to her fifth child while behind bars.*

On March 3, 1662, Sophie Harmansdochter had her tongue — the source of her false witness — cut out, then her scaffold put to the torch.

She survives in Dutch literature as an emblematic deceitful mole.

* A collaborator, Volckje Willems, was also arrested but died in her dungeon before she could qualify for Executed Today treatment.

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1562: The Massacre of Vassy

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March 1 was the date in 1562 of the Massacre of Vassy.

This horror supplies to historical periodization the opening date of the Wars of Religion that would ravage France for the balance of the century.

After the shock jousting death of Henri II, sectarian tensions spun out of control under the unsteady succession of sons still in their minority — and the power behind the oft-transferred throne, Catherine de’ Medici.

But Catherine was a foreigner and the royal authority rested uncertainly on her children’s wee heads. Tense as matters already stood between Catholics and Huguenots, the realm’s shaky sovereignty disinhibited both confessions when it came to ever more irksome provocations.

Seeking to steer past the looming civil war, Catherine promulgated a decree of limited toleration for Huguenots, who were now to be permitted to worship publicly outside of towns. This is called the Edict of Saint-German or the Edict of January — as in, January of 1562, two months before our massacre. It is not taught in politics classes as a triumph of governance.

Whether this right even had force of law at the moment of our story is unclear, inasmuch as Catholic parlements whose ratification was required dragged their feet when it came to reading the edict into the statutes. But some incident like this was looming no matter where things stood from a scriptorium proceduralist’s standpoint.

At Vassy (or Wassy) on our date arrived the retinue of Francis, Duke of Guise. The Guises were a proverbial more-Catholic-than-the-Pope house, and Francis was not the sort of man to pass with equanimity the spectacle of Vassy’s Huguenots openly holding heretical services in a barn. His retainers tried to barge in. High words were exchanged. Scuffles gave way to brickbats and when something struck the duke’s own person a vengeful slaughter of the Calvinists ensued.

Warfare followed fast upon the publication of this atrocity. The chief Protestant lord, the Prince of Conde, openly mobilized for hostilities, seizing and fortifying Protestant towns — and the Catholic faction likewise. Inside of a year, Guise himself would be slain during a siege: one of the first wave of casualties amid 36 years of civil war.

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1562: Michael Lindener, poet laureate

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The Holy Roman Empire poet laureate — self-proclaimed, at least — Michael Lindener was beheaded with a sword on this date in 1562 in Friedberg as a murderer.

Lindener (German Wikipedia entry) routinely signed himself “Poeten”, or “P[oeta].L[aureatus].” — for instance, in the preface to his vernacular satiric classics Rastbüchlein and Katzipori.

Whether Lindener really was an official poet laureate of the empire, however, is not so clear. Lindener was a bit of a hustler and in scrabbling to support himself with his pen in Nuremberg and then Augsburg in the 1550s did not shrink from forging the likes of Savonarola, Melanchthon, and Hessus. (He also worked as a proofreader and a teacher.) His honorifics might also have been fraudulent.

Lindener’s mischief was not confined to literary offenses; he led the roguish life of a Villon-esque picaro.

But while that latter author, a mere thief, escaped the fate anticipated in his “Ballad of the Hanged Man”, Lindener found that stabbing an innkeeper to death was an offense much beyond his eloquence to excuse.

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