The Judge Before the Closed Gates
Kort Kamphues was no stranger to the gates of Coesfeld. He had dwelt behind them, passed judgment upon their citizens, and borne a title that compelled others to appear at his bar. In the year 1572, he found them barred against him—not to deny him entry, but to prevent his departure. The men he had levied for the service of the Spanish crown lay gathered within the town. The municipal magistrate was resolved to assert his authority; the former judge was equally determined to march forth with his company.
He made his escape over the ramparts and across the moat. This defiance consummated a rupture long prepared by years of bitter strife. His civic rights were stripped from him, and he was banished from the municipal territory. A man accustomed to command in the name of the law had become one to whom others assigned boundaries he might no longer cross. Six years later, fires would break out in Coesfeld, and his name would once again stand at the very center of the inquest.
Kamphues was born in Winterswijk. In 1553, the Prince-Bishop of Münster had appointed him judge. For a long opening period, his tenure had provoked none of the open collisions that later disfigured his career. Then he took up residence at the Brink, beyond the precinct wherein the burghers insisted he should dwell. The municipal authorities demanded that he reside within the prescribed limits; he resisted. The contention appeared to turn merely upon a domicile, yet it raised a far graver question: how far might a judicial officer withdraw himself from the municipal duties whence his office drew its authority?
A Fence Does Not Remain a Fence
Upon his land at the Brink, Kamphues caused an enclosure to be erected. Certain townsmen saw in this an infringement upon their customary rights of common and pasture. They tore it down. It would be difficult to find an origin more earthly for an affair destined for the instruments of torture: wooden stakes, beasts whose passage none wished to bar, a proprietor asserting the enclosure as his own, and a community obstinately refusing to acknowledge it.
The dispute did not end with the fallen timber. Complaints soon implicated the judge’s sons, who stood accused of violent assaults and reprisals. Relations with the municipal council grew thoroughly embittered. His dismissal was finally decreed during these contentious years; yet he continued to assert a judicial dignity whose actual exercise had slipped from his grasp. When the affair of the mercenaries arose, neither the man nor his former office sufficed to command obedience at the city gates.
The neighboring country was then consumed by war. Recruiters searched for men, soldiers sought their pay, and the shifting of troops readily served as a screen for far less lawful undertakings. Kamphues and his sons were linked to the captain Martin Schenk. Local tradition later attributed to them vast campaigns of brigandage; such an image cannot be accepted without reserve. What took shape with certainty around Coesfeld was a network of armed men and military connections, whose capacity for intimidation the authorities had good cause to dread.
The Letter and the Matches
In March 1578, a beggar-woman named Trude Bosekers was caught attempting to deposit a threatening letter at the dwelling of the new judge, Goddert von Merveldt. The city suddenly possessed a living subject for interrogation, rather than a mere rumor to ponder. She was put to the question. The declarations extracted from her turned all suspicion toward the house at the Brink.
Two days after the discovery of the letter, fires broke out in several houses. They were subdued. Incendiary slow-matches were discovered, and the terror of a disaster narrowly averted lent an even greater urgency to the investigation. This was no longer the bluster of an aggrieved man muttering vows of vengeance: someone had set about reducing the town to ashes. Who had fashioned these devices? Who had distributed them? Who had given the command? The judicial inquiry purported to answer all these questions by inflicting torment upon those already in its grasp.
Maria, Kamphues’s daughter, his companion Margarethe Lohaus, and a domestic servant, Hinrich von Köln, were seized as they entered Coesfeld. Their examinations led to further accusations. At the Brink, Kamphues and his sons learned of the arrests and took to flight. This evasion hardened suspicion; yet flight alone could not distinguish an accomplice to arson from a man terrified of what an inquiry leveled against his household must inevitably produce.
The resulting confessions did not form a calm and harmonious narrative. Accusations were tossed between kin and servants; torture dictated its own questions and demanded its expected answers. The hand of Wilhelm, one of the sons, appeared far more persistently in the incendiary plot than that of his father. As for Kort, his precise guilt remained disputed down to his final written words. His malice toward Coesfeld was notorious; to transform that hatred into proof of every crime laid to his family’s charge was quite another matter.
The Pursuit of the Kamphues
Warrants for their arrest passed from one jurisdiction to another. The town also engaged one Andreas Sonderhaus, promising him a bounty for each fugitive delivered into their hands, together with the right to return to his native soil despite an ancient homicide. The choice possessed its own practical logic: they required a man capable of infiltrating the circles where the outlaws found shelter. It had, too, its bitter irony: to apprehend the suspects, the magistrates bargained with an individual whose own capacity for violence was well known to them.
Sonderhaus ran Wilhelm and a companion to earth among the soldiery. He entered their service as a lackey, bided his time until he accompanied them to Bois-le-Duc, and there produced the requisite papers to secure their arrest. The father was captured separately near Bocholt in June 1578. He was conveyed to Bevergern. The former magistrate was not to be tried in the city against which he had accumulated so vast an inheritance of hatred.
The criminal proceedings instituted against him concerned the breach of the public peace, and must not be confounded with any distinct condemnation for the catalogue of brigandage and arson that later legend attributed to his name. Under torture, he confessed. He obtained the mercy of capital execution by the sword. On December 9, 1578, at Bevergern, he who had so often pronounced judgment received the execution of his own.
The Writing Left for the Morrow
Before meeting his end, Kamphues resolved to leave a declaration behind him. The old chronicle of Coesfeld records that he asked to speak with his confessor, enjoining him that the writing be revealed only after his death. In this paper, he recanted the confessions wrung from him by torment and denied all share in the plot to burn the town. Such a deathbed utterance did not, by its mere solemnity, constitute incontrovertible proof of innocence; yet it forbade posterity from treating his confessions as a free and steadfast submission to the narrative of his judges.
Other persons had already perished, or were yet to perish, in this bloody business. Women were burned at the stake, prisoners died before the conclusion of their process, while certain survivors were at length set free. These divergent fates outline a history far more disquieting than the cautionary tale of a magistrate turned freebooter. There had indeed been an incendiary plot, there had been menaces and a pursuit; but there had also been accusations extorted under conditions that gravely undermine their truth.
In the nineteenth century, Bernhard Sökeland, who examined the surviving records at Coesfeld, expressed his explicit disquiet. The historian sought neither to efface the disorders nor to excuse the violence; yet he questioned whether the methods employed could ever have established what the tribunal so boldly claimed to know. Thus did the last writing of Kamphues continue its work long after its author had perished. The gates that he had once forced had closed forever upon his life. His recantation, however, left the judgment ajar.